Have you ever walked into a kitchen restaurant and noticed how many things are repaired with tin foil? A colleague of mine said the same thing about the bindery in his plant—so many things held up or propped open with bindery supplies.

We solve problems with the tools we’re familiar with and we have immediate access to. When we solve problems in this manner, the solution is easy to understand and repair is easy. You add more tin foil.

Now think about what we collectively do when we have challenges with print software (Print MIS & web-to-print). We try to solve them with the tools we’re familiar with or the solutions that have worked before. This often gets us in trouble. I was speaking with a CSR the other day> She called to tell me that they were not getting email notifications when orders were placed. Sounds like a reasonable support call right? When I looked at the system, the CSR associated with the customer she was referring to had an email address of [email protected]. Sounds like an easy support answer right? Not so fast; when I asked why the CSR for this company was [email protected]she told me that many of their customers are house accounts which are cared for by the group of CSRs, not by a dedicated CSR. So the real problem she had was she needed to know how to use the web-to-print software with customers that are cared for by a pooled resource of CSRs. She never asked that question. She solved it on her own and it broke the software.