Early adoptor Picton Press, the first printer in Australia to implement EFI PACE MIS (management information system), says the software is now crucial to its operation.
“Pretty much nothing happens in the business now without EFI PACE being involved,” said Picton’s data services manager Brad Hall, who helped to set up the system at the Perth-based commercial printer three years ago. EFI PACE features an integrated print MIS system for print estimating, production, accounting, sales management and ecommerce.
“PACE now does all of our estimating, production and invoicing,” said Hall. “We generate our estimate and the estimate goes to a job, the job is then communicated across to pre-press and machinery, then dispatch is done in the system, as well as the invoicing. We also have EFI Digital Storefront for Web-to-Print and we’re now using EFI Metrix Planning and Imposition software, also an EFI product, that is integrated directly into PACE.
“Instead of putting your finger in the wind and saying, Yeah, the machine’s running so we must be making money, we’re now getting an unprecedented level of detail. We can now look at jobs and say, Are we really making money on this kind of job, on that kind of job? Are we over-estimating or under-estimating the time on, for example, the stitcher, or whatever it may be.
The EFI PACE system was now crucially important to the business and had helped Picton to weather the mining downturn, said the data guru. “Very much so, and I have to say that because my job revolves around the system, but yes, very much so. We’ve seen a bit of a downturn over the past two years in WA. Being in an economy that’s learning to survive without a mining boom has definitely been tough but we like to remain optimistic and look for trends. The economy as a whole is trying to recover and things are okay but as most of the market is finding it’s all about tight margins and quick turnarounds.
"Our MIS has put us in the best place to deal with that market. We can look at just how tight we can go on a margin, and that’s a real margin, not just a guess. You can look at a job and say, We’ll bank ‘X’ dollars on this, based on the fact that we know our data, as far as machine speeds and everything else goes. We know that our costs are accurate and that’s where a lot of the benefit comes from.
“It allow us to get really granular with the data that’s coming back into the system," said Hall. "All the business decisions we make are now based on data rather than guessing and that’s the biggest change."
Picton Press has been established for 27 years and is now run by company directors Dennis Hague and Gary Kennedy, with a staff of 55.