Your Print MIS/ERP should be your trusted system of record. For a lot of printers, the data in their Print MIS is not trusted. How does data become untrustworthy? I’ve been keeping track of creative solutions to challenges that cause underlying data trust issues. Your business is faced with challenges almost daily. Customers ask you to support crazy things, the software you have forces you into certain workflows, and your people think up crazy ways of getting jobs out the door.

The users of software—your sales people, your customer service team, your technical team, etc.—aren’t generally aware of all the underlying issues data integrity can create. Here’s an easy way to understand this issue. Someone in your organization created another customer record in your Print MIS for a customer that already existed under a slightly different name. This is an obvious one to think through. From a data integrity standpoint, this is a mess because this customer’s business with you will be split (arbitrarily) between these two records in your Print MIS. Your customer service team will not have a full picture of jobs in process, your reports will not reflect the full business, and your sales people may or may not be getting commissioned correctly. I’ve seen companies work around this issue for years, meaning they do extra work in many places instead of doing the work to clean up the duplicate customer records. The lack of data integrity slows you down, requires extra steps to get to accurate data, and generally relies on humans to make data accurate. My favorite thing to see in a Print MIS customer record is the name of the company with an ALL CAPS _DO NOT USE_ in front if it.

To many folks this might sound like nitpicking. There are more important things to deal with than meaningless mistakes in Print MIS data, right? There are always competing priorities in every business and I’m in no way suggesting that data integrity is the MOST important business priority. What I’m trying to convey is that your Print MIS data integrity has a major ripple effect throughout your business that has one very predictable impact—it slows you down, increases the chances for errors, and makes you more reliant on human labor which impacts your profitability.