Founded in 1948, the Schiele Group has grown to be one of Chicago's largest commercial printers. Keys to the Group's success include a conservative approach to business and its ever growing array of products and services.
 
Schiele operates its Digital and Sheet-fed presses out its Schiele Graphics facility and its Heat-set half webs and continuous forms presses out if its Repro Graphics plant, both facilities located in Elk Grove Village, Illinois.
 
Creating customized portholes for online order entry is one of our fastest growing markets.  Schiele receives 30 plus orders a day, for both static and customized on demand products.  These orders often create work beyond digital printing, most require some bindery work, fulfillment, and/or mailing services.  Being able to produce a wide variety of different products has helped the company survive through this difficult time
 
I came across the Estimator booth at Print 09 and wasn't even interested in a new estimating system. I had given up all hope after bad experiences with two of the major software providers. I heard many horror stories about printing companies spending hundreds of thousands of dollars and years trying to implement a fully integrated system.  We had PSI for at least 15 years and were never able to get the estimating portion usable and EFI is now going to stop its support.
 
The companies of the Schiele group have diverse capabilities with Digital, Sheetfed, Heat-set Web and continuous forms presses.  Mark Myers Estimators President showed me during the demo that the Estimator software already had most of our presses built in. During the ten minute demo, I threw the kitchen sink of estimates at him.  He was able to do most of them with the software on his laptop. I asked him about the cost and was shocked at how little it was.  At that price, I had to at least show my staff back at the plant. Estimator did a Webinar and our people were as impressed with the system and Mark as was I.  The all in price was low and if it didn't work we could easily take the hit.  Once we bought the system Estimator was all over customizing it for our applications. I think they worked nights and weekends. Another great thing is when we call with questions we are talking to the developer, who knows the system inside and out, not some call center.
 
We are testing Estimator against our current system and are close enough to feel comfortable using it because it is almost fool proof and so very much faster that ours.