I ask the following question every time I engage with a printer: “Who is your print MIS/ERP administrator?” It tells me a lot about what we’re going to have to do to make foundational changes in the way the print business uses software tools. Here are some of the common answers. 

Your Print MIS/ERP is a complicated piece of software, it doesn't matter which one you’re using. It has hundreds or thousands of features. If it’s a commercial product, it wasn’t built to cater to the precise way you run your business. It was built in a generic fashion to run print businesses like the one you own or work at. This means you must be flexible. Your processes, your people, and your way of doing things has to “flex” to match how the software works. Software doesn’t flex to you. It’s configurable, but you shouldn’t think of it like a recipe that you can change to perfectly match the tastes of your business. Instead, you should think of a Print MIS/ERP more like a puzzle that has fixed pieces that were designed to work together in a specific way. If you go out of those specific patterns, you end up trying to force pieces together that were never really meant to be together. 

A Print MIS/ERP administrator is your internal expert on the software that runs your business. I would say the number one reason some printers are successful with their Print MIS solutions while others are in a constant state of frustration really comes down to whether they have a designated internal Print MIS/ERP expert or not. When you do not have an internal expert, everyone in your organization does the best they can with the tools they know how to use. So just think about the heavy users of your Print MIS/ERP: customer service and estimating. When employees in these functional areas are faced with a challenge involving the Print MIS/ERP, they use email, spreadsheets, printed notes, and PDFs to solve the problems because those are the tools they understand. You can see this happening in real time in almost every print organization. Someone asks a question, the customer service agent doesn’t know so they start tracking this information in a spreadsheet or a printed log or on a Post-It™ note on their monitor. Think about this happening over years and years and you know what kind of mess is being created.