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The Company
Poor Richards Press is a digital and small-format offset printing
company with 75 employees operating out of five locations in the San
Luis Obispo, California area. Its products include single-color and
full-color books, catalogs, brochures, manuals, and other business
printing.
The Challenge
The company
wanted to acquire a business management system that would help
manage and grow the business. Since it operated out of five
locations, a key system requirement was the ability to integrate
locations and view data for any location from any location.
The Solution
Management knew
the search for a solution would be challenging, so they retained
Profectus to help with their initiative and to provide the knowledge
and expertise on printing-industry business software that their own
employees did not have.
The company assembled a six-member selection team representing
management, sales, customer service, production, purchasing, and
accounting. Each team member was responsible for evaluating and
selecting a system for his or her area of responsibility.
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Company
Poor
Richard's Press, Inc.
2222 Beebee Street
San Luis Obispo, CA 93401
Sheetfed and Digital Printing
125 Employees
Challenge
Acquiring a system to integrate their 7 locations so support data
can be viewed for any location from any location.
Solution
Profectus, Inc. Print Management System Selection Consulting Service
Results
The evaluation
of products opened employees’ eyes to the many new ways that
software could improve and standardize business processes across the
enterprise. |
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At the project kick-off meeting, the Profectus consultant educated
the team with a series of seminars on software capabilities,
terminology, benefits, and trends. For three consecutive days, the
team met to identify the company’s business needs and system
requirements. Profectus used a checklist of over 1,000 software
requirements as a guide to help the team define Poor Richards Press’
requirements. The selection team identified and prioritized a total
of 395 requirements encompassing the applications.
To support Poor Richard Press’ multi-location needs, the team also
identified the following requirements:
1. The ability to combine or segregate data from the
five locations including estimates, orders, purchases, schedules,
and financials
2. The ability to manage and track the production of a
single job being manufactured in multiple locations
3. The ability to order materials from any location for
any location
4. The ability to view information for any location
from any location
5.The ability to produce monthly profit-and-loss statements for each
location
6. The ability to operate all five locations from one
central server.
The selection team determined that the system needed to support a
total of 30 administrative users and 19 production users.
Poor Richards Press benchmarked its requirements against a long-list
of approximately 85 printing-industry software products. The group
narrowed down the long list to five products compatible with their
requirements:
1. Pace Systems Group
2. PARSEC
3. EPMS Enterprise
4. EFI / Hagen System
5. EFI / PrintSmith
A
Request For Proposal (RFP) was prepared and sent to the vendors on
the short list. The RFP provided the software vendors with
information about Poor Richards Press’ organization, production
equipment, computer systems, system requirements, and selection
schedule. The RFP also solicited information from the vendors such
as system capabilities, support, pricing, and references.
The vendors submitted proposals and a product comparison analysis
was created to benchmark the capabilities of each system against the
requirements of Poor Richard Press. Copies of the proposals and the
analysis were distributed to each team member for review.
After carefully examining the product proposals, the team identified
EFI/Hagen and EPMS Enterprise as the closest match to Poor Richard
Press’ requirements. The two vendors were asked to provide the team
with an on-site presentation of their products.
Profectus helped the team create demonstration scripts for the two
vendors to follow during their product presentations. This enabled
the vendors to customize their presentations to Poor Richard Press'
needs, improving the efficiency and relevance of the product
demonstrations.
Each
vendor gave a full-day demonstration of its product to the selection
team following the scripted job scenarios - from estimating through
order entry, production, and accounting.
The Results
After each
demonstration, the team conducted meetings to objectively review the
pros and cons of each system. This positioned the team to make a
final selection of EPMS Enterprise by the completion of the last
demonstration.
In many ways, the process Poor Richards Press went through to find a
suitable solution was just as valuable as the solution itself. The
process of defining company requirements gave Poor Richards Press a
better understanding of how its business operated. The evaluation of
products opened employees’ eyes to the many new ways that software
could improve and standardize business processes, and ensured the
success of the project by producing employee “buy-in.” |
Poor Richards Press
