It took Work House Signs, in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, seven years to reach a total of 500,000 jobs prior to installing an automated workflow solution. It reached 3 million uploads in just three months after fully implementing the software. It is a perfect testament to just how much an inefficient workflow can strangle growth.
Work House Signs’ experience underscores an important truth. Your biggest obstacle to growth isn’t your people, your equipment, or your customers. It’s your workflow.
Bottlenecks in your shop’s workflow — from file submission to final invoicing — don’t just hamper productivity. They can also set artificial limits on the amount of work you can accept, preventing growth.
This is exactly what happened to Enedy Brache, managing partner at Plantation, Florida-based A-Plus Printing and Graphic.
“We went from seven or eight people in prepress to two people in prepress,” he notes. And it wasn’t because he let those people go, but rather redeployed them into areas where they were more needed, such as sales and marketing.
How did he do it? Brache notes that he has a background as a software engineer, so for him, it was an exciting challenge to tackle creating a streamlined workflow. Using FileMaker Pro and building around some InSoft Automation modules, he created a workflow that completely rethought how files moved in and out of his operation.
Read this full article on Printing Impressions, a publication of PRINTING United Alliance, ASI’s strategic partner.
