New Orleans, LA - A new print management system was announced at the first annual NPOA (National Print Owners Association) conference in New Orleans. Mark Darling, president and CEO of Docket Manager, announced the release of the new system with the same name, Docket Manager. Docket Manager is a Canadian based software development company with a U.S. office in South Carolina.

Mark & Deborah Darling, who own Track 21 Graphix, a Canadian printing company, said that Docket Manager was created by print shop owners for print shop owners. As he searched for a modern and efficient sales driven system that would take advantage of today’s web and mobile devices for his own printing company, Darling said existing options did not fit his business’s needs. He began the development of Docket Manager in 1999, a browser based, database driven, print management and estimating system.

Darling has capitalized on his 18 years of business experience and contacts to build a development and support team that comes from the printing industry’s leaders. “It makes a big difference in the development when the team understands the business from the inside. We are all tuned into the daily challenges of the industry and focused on a solution that will drive sales and efficiency,” said Darling. “We also have real world working environments to develop and test new features before their release.”

“It was very important from the beginning that we build Docket Manager with a focus on making our jobs at the print shop more efficient. We wanted to be able to focus more time on sales and less time on process. Additionally, we wanted a very open system that would be friendly to other systems. We therefore built the system in a .NET/SQL framework. We purposely avoided technologies like Flash that have proven to be a problem with mobile devices. We started with great technology and then built a very user friendly user interface upon that. The UI scales very nicely from a full screen computer monitor, to a laptop, to a tablet, to a smartphone,” Darling said.

Deborah Darling commented after we integrated Docket Manager we actually went from 10 employees down to 4 employees and amazingly increased our productivity and reduced waist. Other users have shared similar experience regarding the ability to reduce staff after the implementation of the Docket Manager system.

The system is platform agnostic and can run on any computer or mobile device with a browser. “We wanted to accomplish several things with the development platform; the system had to be fast, it had to be scalable, it had to be able to easily integrate with external systems such as CRM, accounting, company websites, web-2-print, workflow, imposition, social media, email marketing, and preflight to name a few,” Darling said.

Docket Manager currently has more than 30 companies in Canada using the system ranging from small print shops to very large commercial printing operations. Docket Manager plans to continue to grow their customer base in Canada and will now additionally be expanding into the U.S. market.

Darling is also proud to announce today that he has partnered with Chuck Lobaugh, a fellow print shop owner in Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, for U.S. sales of Docket Manager. Lobaugh has extensive print management experience from current and past print shop ownership in addition to the implementation of newspaper production management systems.

“I have used, installed, and researched a wide array of production management systems over the years. Docket Manager is the first system that I have seen that has all tools that I have been hoping for included in one system. Today we can no longer just create estimates and process jobs. We must have fully integrated systems that help us to manage customer relationships from our website though our sales organization and manage our production with efficiency. It must run on today’s technology and be fast, nimble, and able to adapt quickly. Docket Manager does this and as soon as I saw what Mark had developed, I immediately knew it was an outstanding product. I not only wanted it for my own shop, but I wanted to be a part of it on a larger scale. I am very excited to be a part of the Docket Manager team,” said Lobaugh.

“The printing industry is changing as we all know and we built Docket Manager to be able to rapidly change with it,” said Darling. “We built the system to be very efficient. We wanted our CSRs to be able to respond very quickly to estimate request and once converted to an order, we wanted the system to be as automated as possible to reduce the number of human touches that were required to process the orders throughout the production process. We built in things like job templates, job ticketing, job tracking, time tracking, location management, CRM, online customer accounts, and credit card processing directly into the system. These are not additional modules that have to be purchased — they are all included.” 

Docket Manager is a SAAS (software as a service) solution. “We want our customers to have all of the tools they need to be successful, so we include everything. The pricing is simply based on the number of seats the business needs and is completely scalable accordingly,” said Darling.

Darling said that the software industry is moving very quickly towards the SAAS software delivery model for many reasons. It is a much more efficient way to develop and roll out software. Customers do not have to wait for a year or longer for a significant upgrade. Instead the software is continuously updated and customers benefit from new features as soon as they are available. Hosted solutions are also very mobile. The system can accessed from anywhere including mobile devices. Furthermore, redundancy is built in on the backend.

Darling said, “Our goal is to help printers not only to survive, but to succeed. We feel that Docket Manager will finally give print shop owners the right tools at the right time.”