A print business interacts with many external businesses daily. The most obvious daily external interaction is with your customers. The other daily interaction is with your suppliers/vendors. We talk a lot about integration within your business. For example, does your web-to-print system integrate with your Print MIS/ERP system? In this article, I want to talk about your integration opportunities with external organizations and their systems (customers and suppliers). 

Let’s first step back and consider that integration efforts should always be in the service of a clear business objective. Generally, we want to remove manual steps in business processes, increase our speed, and oftentimes reduce errors by programmatically transferring data vs. manually transferring data. These guiding principles apply to internal integrations (between systems that operate within your business) and external integration (between your systems and your customers’/suppliers’ systems). 

As soon as your business starts to integrate with external systems, you want to consider a strategic approach to integration. I’m always looking for ways to establish a reusable approach so that every time a customer or a supplier wants to integrate you are not recreating the wheel each time (at your expense). Integrations are notorious for creating a ton of technical debt. You don’t want a ton of technical debt. Technical debt is basically labor required to maintain technical systems in your business. It is hard to find good technical people; giving them a ton of different systems that require lots of care and feeding is loading them up with technical debt. Keeping your systems streamlined and as similar as possible reduces technical debt. I always think about Southwest Airlines’ initial strategy of having all the same planes across their fleet. They were able to streamline their operations a ton by removing that variable in their business operations, thereby lowering their technical debt.