One of the most overwhelming and fear generating considerations for a printer or any business to face is to contemplate transitioning their management information system or Print MIS. We’ve all heard of the colossal failures in the large ERP implementation world, “a large corporation nearly goes out of business trying to implement SAP or Oracle, because it takes five years and cost 10x the budget.” Who would willingly proceed on a project that seems to have so much inherent risk?

We don’t really have a choice, in 2013 if you can’t accurately calculate your profitability at the job level, you are driving your business without the visibility required to understand how to react to the changing market conditions (declining print volumes, contracting prices, and pressure to diversify your product and services offerings). In the past our industry had enough room in margins to lead print businesses by strong hunches (you just knew where your prices needed to be, you could feel when more equipment was needed, and you understood when more labor was necessary). The market isn’t providing fat enough margins to manage your business that way anymore.

You have to make decisions based on accurate and timely data that is accessible to all levels of your organization at the right time with the right amount of detail. The core purpose of a Print MIS is to track and measure the primary inputs to your custom manufacturing process; labor and raw materials. If you accurately track those inputs you can assess and measure many other critical aspects of your business. For example: profitability by job, profitability by customer, profitability by print application, etc. There are lots of other features and functionality of a Print MIS but let’s not lose sight of the core value proposition - capture operational data in order to make better business decisions. Are you facing a Print MIS transition? What business decisions (based on accurate and timely data) do you want to make with the new Print MIS?