A lot of print businesses have teams that have been with them for a long time. Long-term employment at a print business is a sign of a healthy company, healthy culture, and good management. We all want long-term employees who continue to grow and learn as the company evolves.

One downside to having a lot of long-term employees is that the business often lacks outside perspectives and can become quite insular. If you're successful, the insular nature of the business is also backed by confidence because the market keeps rewarding you by giving you more customers, business, and profits. Of course, all print businesses have outside perspectives from customers; each customer you engage with gives you a little different flavor of what they want, how they want it, and what they are willing to pay for it. The outside perspective that I want to talk about here pertains to how other print businesses are solving their challenges with print software.

There are a few times in a print business’ life where an outside perspective is critical because a print business hopefully only does certain projects once or maybe twice in their history, such as a Print MIS transition. Your team is supremely confident in their knowledge of your business, as they should be. The issue isn’t knowledge of your business; the issue is the knowledge of how to best fit your business into the Print MIS to which you’re transitioning. People make a lot of assumptions about what a Print MIS implementation requires. Here’s where I’ll start. A good Print MIS implementation will require you to make hundreds (maybe thousands) of decisions about your business.