You know when you’re about to paint your house, your consciousness starts to focus on paint colors. You start to notice the colors of your neighbor’s house. You comment about the color of people’s clothes. For me, I started to tell people I wanted my house to be the color of my dog’s ears!

I think my consciousness has been in this industry too long and looking for root causes too many times. No matter what print business I’m in, could be commercial, wide-format, labels and packaging—doesn’t matter—all I see is a lack of data integrity. People don’t trust the data in their Print MIS/ERP. I’m speaking with printers all the time about exciting business development opportunities, new products, online ordering, building custom software to solve customer data challenges upstream and downstream. Those are exciting. They have real momentum with leadership, they feel like good investments. 

Nobody wants to talk about data integrity. Nobody wants to volunteer to do the heavy lifting to get data to be accurate and trusted. It just feels like tedious work. “Shouldn’t the vendors have done this for us” is a common complaint? How did our data get so messy? Shouldn’t the software protect us from doing stupid things? Your data might have been a mess when you imported it into this current Print MIS/ERP. Your data got messier as you used it because you don’t have defined processes or “rules of engagement” for how you do the repeatable business processes in your business.