With the economy being what it is, it was great to run across some good news in a back issue of American Printer: Action Printing, a Kodak customer, was elected to the NAPL's Management Plus Hall of Fame.

Action Printing's President, Gregg Davies, credits their success to one single business philosophy — excellence — in employee relations, print quality and service. They empower employees and pull out all of the stops to meet and understand the needs of their clients. But that's only two-thirds of the secret.

"Maintaining a high-level, consultative relationship with our clients and providing consistent quality requires not only a highly trained staff and innovative management, but the ability to move forward with advancing technology," says Davies. "As an example, Action Printing was the first printer in the United States to digitally link its customer service department to its high-speed saddle stitchers, replacing time-consuming hand adjustments with CSR-generated instructions."

The digital link Davies mentioned is actually KODAK UPFRONT Production Planning Software. Using UPFRONT's job building wizard, the CSRs at Action Printing digitally create their folding dummies, plan their jobs, and then export JDF data to automate the setup of their bindery equipment. Adjustments to set fold, cuts and more are no longer manually done. This automation has reduced setup times from 65 to 24 minutes. And wasted plates have declined from 3% to 1.4%. For this achievement, Action Printing received the CIPPI award for best cost/benefit realization from automation. You can read the more on about this story here.

I don't want to sound like a salesperson here, but in these uncertain economic times there are certain ways that you can weather the storm and come out the better for it.  One way is investing in EMS software.  KODAK EMS Software is for managing the entirety of your business, from quoting and estimating to production, shipping and accounting. It has a single database that collects information throughout your business and gives you real-time information on any aspect of your business: the status of a job; the size of your sales pipeline; who are your best customers or sales people; where you're making money or losing it; the actual vs. estimated cost of any job... and more.

Here are 5 ways EMS software can help:

1. Better Control Costs Your Costs - Analyze the profitability of your jobs and your customers to discover where you are making or losing money. Many business owners simply do not know—or do not realize that "cash cows" or top customers of yesteryear might no longer be profitable. You should also regularly compare job costs against estimates so that you can avoid under-pricing your work.  You should also create daily end-of-month and end-of-quarter projections to stay on track with your financial plan or be able to take corrective action before it's too late.
   
   
2. Optimize Business Performance - Set key performance indicators (KPIs) that will help you meet your primary business goals, whether financial, sales-oriented or even service-oriented. There are literally thousands of KPIs. You need to find the right ones that will help you hone your business strengths. Sample KPIs include revenue per quarter, the value of your sales pipeline and the number of rings until a customer call is answered. But it's not enough to set and measure KPIs. When you don't meet an important KPI, you should analyze the cause and take corrective action. You should also post relevant KPIs throughout your business and share the results with employees.
   
   
3. Create New Opportunities - Use customer relationship management (CRM) on a daily basis in order to improve customer service and to ensure that customers know all of your products and services. You should continually analyze your best opportunities and monitor progress. An MIS/ERP system like KODAK EMS Business Software will generate follow-up tasks so that opportunities aren't missed.
   
   
4. Capture More Revenue - Identify the 20% of products that bring you 80% of your profits and focus your sales team on selling your profitable items. You should also use automation to quickly produce accurate quotes which has been statistically proven to improve win-loss ratios. You should also enable online services using KODAK InSite Storefront which can reduce labor costs on relatively simple items. Manage both your offline and online businesses with daily financial analysis and with KPIs.
   
   
5. Better Manage Your Finances - You should consolidate financial data so you can easily get a real-time view of your business and react faster when you need to make a decision. You would be surprised how many printers simply don't have access to real-time data. You should expedite invoicing processes to improve quote-to-cash while improving liquidity. A faster invoicing process will also let you convert "free" last-minute job changes into revenue by being able to add changes to an open invoice or to quickly issue a supplemental invoice. Or you could even issue a no-charge invoice of last minute changes buy your customer's allegiance and demonstrate what great service you can deliver!

For those of us minding the office, the plethora of video and Internet articles can almost make us feel like we're at drupa, without ever leaving our PCs. (OK, maybe I exaggerate a bit.)  This post on the fire in the Xerox booth is my favorite so far (except for the announcement that Range Printing selected EMS Business Software)

We even managed to find a picture of the event:


Thankfully no one was hurt and give Xerox credit for posting a quick explanation of the incident.  Things are certainly hot at drupa this year!