Micropress maximizes operations with the Midmarket Print Suite

The best fit for our business

“We looked at what was available on the market and decided eProductivity Software was the best fit for our business,” Cross says, and he found the Suite’s estimating, financial management and PrintFlow® dynamic scheduling features proving to be superior to other systems Micropress considered.

Micropress was especially impressed by the Midmarket Print Suite’s tracing of jobs in progress and the flexibility of the scheduling system that allows optimization of a production workflow and throughput maximization. The Suite’s automatic and accurate collection of up-to-the-minute production data includes counts, press status, speed, and other critical information directly from the equipment. It is machine- and brand-independent, and the way it works is tuned to the printing press it is hooked up to. “The dynamic scheduling component, for example, gives you the impression it’s clever. If you didn’t know any better, you’d be excused to believe it actually ‘thinks’
through certain decisions – it’s all non-linear and fed by the data each machine generates,” Cross explains.

As PrintFlow® dynamic scheduling is a rules-based system, the software is able to continuously interpret recorded data in real-time and translate that into strategic business actions. Cross explains how his Suite could, for example, prefer to run a job that is supposed to go to bindery tomorrow at 5:00 p.m. before a similar job that is
supposed to go to bindery tomorrow at noon, based on the fact that the job due at 5:00 is printed on media that requires a longer drying time. “It finds the ways to have the production environment as a whole run at its optimum – globally, not only on a machine by machine basis,” Cross said.

This doesn’t just benefit production efficiency but has important effects on estimating costs of a job, invoicing, equipment usage, media and ink consumption.

Better, quicker decisions

Micropress has been using the Midmarket Print Suite for six months now, and although the system hasn’t been rolled out across all of the company’s processes, it’s already seeing some spectacular benefits. “We’ve become much better at estimating,” says Cross. “Estimating is crucial to the business. Getting that right is the biggest thing. Because of the Suite’s continuous feedback about the actual costs of a job or type of job, we can check that we are estimating accurately.”

It has also enabled Micropress to easily recognize – through increased visibility – which specific areas are potentially more profitable than others. ePS Pace, the core of the Midmarket Print Suite, streamlines key administrative work such as accounts payables tasks. “Another big improvement we’ve seen in the past few months is the reduction of processes involved in invoicing,” explains Cross.

“It used to take three people to process our invoices with our previously installed system, now it only takes one person.” Getting to that level of automation and labour savings in invoicing does require that the information which is fed into the system needs to be clean at the input side. For this reason, Cross does not deny that adopting a new MIS or ERP system takes time and is best done in phases.

Micropress so far has been focusing its Suite implementation on the most important part of its business, but there are additional opportunities to streamline operations to come, such as bringing Suite tools for inventory management online, along with fully integrating the company’s Fiery Driven™ digital printing operations with the Suite so its digital production information automatically flows through the Suite.

With those future capabilities of the Suite still to come to fruition, “We expect big benefits to lay ahead,” according to Cross.