By Noel Ward, Editor@Large, PrintPlanet
In case you haven’t noticed, customers expect more than they once did, and are not shy about asking for new levels of service. Delivering on this can be a vital differentiator for your business because it imbues a higher level of care to the work you do for each customer.
I’d already heard this from several commercial shops, but I needed to hear from an in-plant, so I called Mount Carmel Health System to see how serving customer needs might require changes in work processes, including the implementation of a Print MIS at its core.
Although some say this can be a challenging experience, what I’ve heard from commercial shops and again from Mount Carmel is that the value far outweighs the challenges.
The in-house printing department at Mount Carmel Health System serves four hospitals, several free-standing emergency centers, plus specialty and primary care outpatient facilities in central Ohio. The operation also provides printing services for other regional hospital systems.
Carol Stokes, Printing Services Operations Manager, says her facility produces over 1.5 million impressions per month, although that range increases when building inventory levels for materials that are kept in stock.
Chasing Time
Stokes says the in-plant operation was challenged by time lost to pricing, quoting, tracking jobs, keeping the flow of short-run jobs on schedule, and keeping customers looped in on job status.
“We didn’t have an efficient way of providing quotes to customers or a system for tracking inventory,” recounts Stokes. “We were relying on paper tickets and an antiquated manual billing system.
“We were physically tracking down job tickets to see where a job was in the workflow and couldn’t track those jobs once they were out for delivery. We needed a digital solution that would allow us to streamline all these processes.”
Stokes came to her role after her predecessor had selected PressWise from SmartSoft and built the storefront. She knew its digital solution addressed many of the problems her team faced and that digitizing job tickets would be the foundation of a stronger, more effective workflow. But would it handle the moving production parts of a workflow that included jobs from many customers with unique demands and documents? Stokes had high needs and expectations.
“We made many changes and improvements to our processes” recounts Stokes. “We wanted to create a customer database, track projects, easily configure quotes and invoices, and give customers real-time access to job status. We wanted to be able to review a customer’s history to simplify reordering or verify jobs specs from previous orders. Finally, we needed a way to track deliveries.”
PressWise as a Change Agent
PressWise changed print production at Mount Carmel Health System on every level. The operation can now track jobs instantly, saving time and streamlining customer service. Changes based on quantities, costs and delivery can be quickly created, re-quoted and modified.
Such real-time flexibility became a game-changer. “We are still refining our processes, learning how to utilize both the storefront and the workflow to meet our own and our customers’ needs,” says Stokes.
For example, job delivery can be challenging because customers are spread over a wide area. With PressWise we add a tracking number to the job ticket so we can see when orders are delivered”.
Like many executives who have adopted a Print MIS, Stokes says she wishes the shop had moved to PressWise sooner. “It has been a game-changer for us,” she says. “It provides a wealth of easily accessible information. I can’t imagine not using a system like this.”