Cary Sherburne: Hi, I’m Cary Sherburne, Senior Editor at WhatTheyThink.com and I’m here with Dennis Riggs, who is President and CEO of Mound Printing. Welcome.
Dennis Riggs: Thank you.
Cary: Can you tell us a little bit about your business. How many employees, how long you been in business, that kind of thing?
Dennis: We are, I guess we’re primarily… we’re still primarily a sheet-fed commercial, but we do a lot of digital as well. We do digital, we do print-on-demand from storefronts, we also do mailing, quite a bit of mailing services in house, full service bindery and then we do a lot of marketing services that push a lot of business our way too. So we work with the customer on a lot of different levels in some cases depending on what they need, of course. But just full end to end, I guess…
Cary: And how many employees do you have?
Dennis: Twenty-four employees.
Cary: Oh, that’s great. And so maybe you could talk to us a little bit about, you’re a Pace user, right?
Dennis: That’s right.
Cary: And maybe you can talk to us just a little bit about how you’re using Pace and what that means to you in terms of streamlining your operation because, you know, everybody is facing the same issues, right?
Denis Riggs: Well, I guess the big reason that we came to Pace two years ago was because they had an integration with printable who runs our online storefronts for us. So we get quite a bit of business that comes in that way, so you know, I was looking for a situation where I didn’t care how the job came in, I wanted it to look the same and when it got time to manufacture the piece. So that’s what pace, that’s the value that Pace really brought to us and then it also opened us up to be able to pull in a lot of the things that sort of were running by themselves, so to speak. Like our fulfillment and our mailing and so on and so forth. So all of that now is under one MIS and we are able to get a global view of everything.
Cary: So both your digital and your sheet-fed, that’s great.
Dennis: Yeah. That’s right. And then we also, last year we put in Print Flow and Print Flow had also been able to help us tie things together because I guess with Print Flow it takes a look not only at that call center, but also what’s to happen before that call center and after, you know, in terms of finishing and things like that, so we’re able to anticipate bottlenecks and just do a lot better job of doing more proactive planning.
Cary: Now, so this is the dynamic scheduling?
Dennis: Yeah. Yeah, it’s Udee’s baby.
Cary: Yeah. Udee, the one name EFI person.
Dennis: That’s right.
Cary: Yeah, so if you kind of look back before Pace did you have a MIS before Pace?
Dennis: Yeah, we used to run on Heidelberg’s printing and software, which was great for print, but it just didn’t fit all the different things that we did.
Cary: And is there anyway you can sort of quantify the difference that Pace has made for you and maybe more efficiency, you know, how long it would takes a job to get through the shop or revenues or something like that.
Dennis: It’s hard. You know, a lot of that stuff is… it’s hard to quantify, but I can tell you what it’s done for us more than anything is it’s made us more scalable. We’ve been fortunate enough over the last year-and-a-half, we’ve returned, you know, we had a tough year there in 2009, but 2010 and so far 2011 we’re back to growth.
Cary: Oh that’s great.
Dennis: And so it’s actually, I think it’s actually positioned us better for growth and it’s made these growth spurts that we’ve had and we’ve been used to in the past, I think they’ve been… it’s been easier this time than we’ve seen in the past.
Cary: Yeah, and so it allows you the efficiencies that are… that it gives you it allows you to bring in more business without necessarily hire new people.
Dennis: That’s right. And it’s… yeah, exactly, and it’s easier to plug in… it’s easier to plug in more people and it’s easier to plug in more equipment, more processes because you know, we don’t have to think about it any differently. Once we get it into Pace, we get it estimated and we get it in our schedule, it sort of behaves like everything else.
Cary: That’s great. Well congratulations on your growth.
Dennis: Thank you.