A recent NAPCO study presented at Printing United showed that 69% of commercial Print, sign, display, and graphic providers report hiring production staff as a critical or moderate challenge. In the same discussion, a 2021 Printing United Alliance study showed that 64% say that labor shortage will be a significant challenge this year. This is familiar to our industry. I believe we’ve seen for several years that, with printers, we have to do “more with less.”. You can raise prices and see overall growth, but when you manually manage customers and orders, it leaves little time to find that real growth.

One of the key items or Processes that all printers should be assessing is your order Management system. Order management is a critical component of every business. It can be as simple as paper tickets and file folders to complex software that tracks every movement of a job from capture to delivery. That process determines how you can deliver on customer service and the ability to track every order so that you deliver on time. The challenge is that today, companies depend on their team to over-deliver results with a manual and disintegrated process.

OnPrintShop Web to Print combines Print E-commerce with an integrated order management solution that helps to offer a consistent customer experience. It automates order processes from multiple websites, calls, emails, and walk-ins. This means your team only needs to remember or manage a small amount of data and not have to keep entering the same information multiple times.

The goal of good order management is fourfold:

1. Allows you to share estimations within minutes to increase conversations with customers
2. Automate order processing to reduce cost and increase productivity
3. Offer consistent high-end customer experience to both online and offline orders
4. Centrally manage customer data to grow your sales.

Deals can be won or lost depending on your responsiveness in providing the right price at the right time. Offering instant pricing or a short turnaround on an estimate can increase your probability of winning the business by 21 times. With a manual process, a rushed quote or order can lead to errors that can cause a waste of time, materials, and revenue caused by re-prints. And by not having a process to manage all orders centrally, employees can end up spending more time looking for information than being able to focus on more productive jobs.

Good order management can help free up your key people from up to 80% of the routine operations while reducing human dependency and possible errors. And with that reduced dependency, it allows you to focus on setting up new products and channels or collaborating with vendors to open up new avenues of revenue. Something that isn’t that easy when you’re spending most of your time on a manual process.

So how do you get started looking at your Order Management process? The first thing is an audit. Whether it’s something you do internally or engage an outside source, taking a good hard look at how a job moves through your shop from capture to delivery is key. A business audit can be very critical. When we ask questions of a print company, most do not have any detailed analysis or numbers. It’s much talk about how they “feel” things are going.

Ask Yourself this Questions

• Who is your key customer?
• What percentage of your business is repeat sales?
• What is the breakdown of sales, standard vs custom orders?
• What is your conversion rate for quotes and estimates?
• Which orders are the most profitable that can be repeatable?

Once you can answer those questions, you can begin identifying where and how you want to change. Suppose you’re looking to find a solution such as OnPrintShop; in that case, you want to work closely with your solution provider to help you utilize the capabilities of that solution and understand their best practices. Change is never easy. Start small, focusing on key products and customers who are easy to handle, as it will help your team focus on small tasks to start moving you in the right direction.

OnPrintShop has been working as an Order Management consultant to understand customers’ unique business, understand their challenges, define the right implementation plan and assist in change management to move from existing to new automated processes.

Our team has extensive experience working with Digital Print Shops to companies ranking in the Top 200 of North America. We have helped successful companies reduce the workforce required for order processing from eight to two.

Feel free to Contact Us for a free consultation.

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