In conversations with a printer recently who was looking for ways to streamline their business, I learned they had nothing short of 10 systems that were involved in their primary business process of getting jobs printed, shipped, and invoiced. This printer had taken the approach of “best in breed” solutions for each functional area of their business. This provided them a very feature-rich set of software solutions for each business challenge they were faced with. For example, they had Salesforce for CRM which of course has thousands of features. The realization for this printer was they had strung together best in breed solutions for their business process that wasn’t utilizing most of the features they purchased. They also realized that the overhead of the integration(s) and in some cases the lack of integration between the solutions was slowing them down.

Lots of features in any software package is very compelling. If you compare feature to feature any Print MIS solution’s approach to CRM to the feature set in Salesforce, there is no comparison—Salesforce wins every time. The moral of the story is that more features are not the right way to evaluate software. The right features that you need and (this is important) will ACTUALLY USE is way more important. Eye candy, the feature that looks so cool in a demo but realistically you will never utilize it in production in your plant is a waste of money.

So, this printer has spent significant time and effort stringing together “best in breed” solutions to solve for their workflow. The result is an expensive technology stack to operate and maintain. Integrations are not cheap to start, and they are like children, they keep costing you money even after they’ve matured! The result isn’t a better business process, the result is a slower business process because there are still “drops” between systems. What I mean by drops is that little annoyances that aren’t worth patching (because remember integrations are expensive) but they cause friction in the business process.