May 10, 2010
At the Queen’s Printer, ‘The Truth’ Now Resides in One Place
When Dawson Brenner became director of Print Services at the Queen’s Printer, Victoria, British Columbia, three years ago, he did what most new managers do. He assessed the shop’s strengths and weaknesses. As British Columbia’s official printer for 150 years, Brenner was pleased with its position as the preferred supplier for ministries of both the provincial and federal governments.
The production operation, too, was impressive, with expertise in short-run litho work and digital printing on 10 black-and-white, color and wide-format devices from Xerox Corporation. And it has a highly experienced print production planning staff that directs work to the most efficient source, whether in-house or prequalified private sector suppliers.
An area of concern, he discovered, was the shop’s Print MIS system. The organization uses SAP enterprise resource planning and accounting system, which doesn’t include a print operation module, so the Queen’s Printer used a third-party shop loading system. Getting those two systems to communicate required some data to be entered twice. The system was also overdue for an update, and the Queen’s Printer wanted to expand its customer relationship management capabilities by enabling notes on current and repeated jobs to be stored and easily accessed by all production staff.
It was imperative that we update our Print MIS system to ensure continuity of information and expertise,” Brenner says.
Easing Implementation Challenge
The Queen’s Printer is part of the British Columbia Government’s Procurement and Supply Services within the Ministry of Citizens’ Services and has about 60 employees at its three Victoria plants.
Avanti, a Xerox Business Partner, was chosen as the best overall fit, Brenner says, because it had a strong track record for customized implementations with a range of accounting systems and an elegant, easy-to-use customer relationship management module. In addition, Avanti had its Graphic Arts Management System validated as “Optimized for Xerox FreeFlow” workflow software, enabling a seamless integration with Xerox systems. The Queen’s Printer took further advantage of that by adding Xerox FreeFlow Web Services and Process Manager™ to the solution to automate job submissions via a web storefront.
SAP integrations are not trivial, and this one, implemented took a little longer than expected. “Overall, it went quite well,” Brenner says. “The Avanti- Xerox partnership absolutely helps. It’s not like you’re starting from square one. Avanti’s strength is that it can do anything; when an issue comes up, we know Avanti can handle it.”
Where the Truth Resides
The Queen’s Printer now has two ways to accept jobs—manually and automatically via the web—and both eliminate double entry of data, boosting productivity. For manual order entry, print production planners now have a powerful customer relationship management module for documenting and tracking jobs, thereby making it easy to share job management. The system also brings more discipline to the estimating process, and makes more information available for creation of quotes, Brenner says.
The web ordering system works in conjunction with Xerox FreeFlow Process Manager to automate job submissions—from order creation to pre-flight, imposition, and soft proofing. It cuts the number of times a job file is touched to four from about a dozen, saving considerable staff time.
Regardless of the way orders are submitted, all job information—from the order to statistics on the completed job and remaining inventory—is funneled automatically from the Xerox Freeflow Print Servers into the Avanti system. The Avanti chargeback module produces the monthly billing of customers, where it is manually reviewed, then released into the SAP accounting system for billing.
Brenner finds the customer relationship management module especially valuable. “There are always changes in staffing in our customers, and new people know they are supposed to do a job because someone did it two years ago, but they don’t know how. They count on us to be everyone’s corporate memory, and the system significantly helps us meet this expectation.
“In addition, by tracking actual volumes run on each job,” he says, “we have better control of jobs, and we can be more accurate with our pricing.”
Next steps in the implementation include extending the system to all three Queen’s Printer locations—currently it’s only in the main plant—and to the province’s BC Mail Plus data center as well. Then the entire operation will have a seamless interface to its SAP accounting system and a single, easy-to-use dashboard to review sales history.
Or as Brenner puts it, “Now we have one place where the truth resides.”
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