Buying a Web-to-Print System: 5 Ways Indecision Hurts Your Shop

Buying a web-to-print system can be an intimidating process. As Melissa Donovan points out in an article in the January, 2018 issue of Digital Output, “Hesitation is common when it comes to automating any part of a workflow.” Concerns about the implementation, ongoing maintenance, and system reliability can make print business owners scared to commit to a specific web-to-print system.

But more and more print business owners now realize that delaying a decision about buying a web-to-print system poses its own set of risks.

Here are five ways indecision and delays can hurt your printing business.

Your can lose your competitive edge.

If you don’t make it easy for customers to submit jobs online, you may find your shop losing business to companies that make it easy for multiple staff members to place and track orders.

Online ordering is becoming standard practice - even in the complex world of business-to-business commerce. People who like the speed, ease, and efficiency of online shopping for products for home use want the same convenience for business products and services.

You will waste valuable time.

An integrated web-to-print and order-management system provides an orderly framework for tracking incoming files and instructions from multiple buyers. If your staff wastes a lot of time aggregating files, instructions, and revisions in multiple formats from multiple buyers, an online ordering system can help bring order to the chaos. Online ordering can help ensure that job instructions, production files, and proofs,are transmitted and stored in a consistent and trackable manner.

You will continue to make costly mistakes.

When orders are submitted and processed through a single pipeline, you can always see how many jobs are due each day, each week, and each month. When new jobs, files, and change orders are constantly submitted through different email accounts or sales representatives, it’s almost inevitable that someone’s order or revision request will get lost in the shuffle. The mistake may either drive away a good customer or require reprinting a big order. It’s also possible that a few smaller jobs might not get invoiced.

You won’t be able to make timely corrections to your operations.

With web-to-print ordering systems, you will gain important data about the types of products and services your clients order and value. You can also maintain real-time oversight over how much work in in progress and make important decisions about when you need to add equipment, outsource work, or raise prices. When you see which jobs are most profitable, you can focus more of your marketing budget on growing the demand for those products.

You will stunt future growth prospects.

Printing companies that have already implemented Print MIS and web-to-print solutions have reported that they are more profitable and can handle higher print volumes. Plus, the more organized workflow gave their staff more time to develop new products, services, and niche markets. If you commit to a timeline for making a decision, the payoff can be real.

One reason some print business owners may hesitate to make a decision is because they are inundated with choices. And some may believe that they must buy a Print MIS program from one vendor and a full-featured web-to-print solution from a different vendor.

At Ordant, we don’t think it’s necessary to invest a lot of time researching and integrating programs from two separate vendors. Our easy-to-implement order-management and estimating program integrates seamlessly with our optional web-to-print module.

We have worked extensively with many different types of printing businesses, including signmakers, screen-printing firms, large-format and grand-format specialists, digital print shops, and commercial printers. We have a clear idea of the types of complex challenges your shop faces everyday.

Not one of our software users has the exact same fleet of printing and finishing devices as another user. Nor do our customers all offer the same types of products. So, our developers have made it super-easy for our software users to customize many features themselves. .

We also believe in making your workflow simple. Web-to-print software should be easy for your shop to implement, easy for.employees to use, and easy for your customers to use.

The age-old proverb “He who hesitates is lost” means that if you spend too much time pondering what to do you might lose the chance to act altogether. In today’s super-fast business environment, that proverb could be revised to read: “He who hesitates has lost money.”  .

We urge you not to hesitate in making a decision about buying an order-management system and web-to-print capabilities.

But before you do, we also suggest that you schedule a demonstration of Ordant’s cloud-based software for small- to medium-sized printing businesses and sign shops. You might be amazed to see how simple it can be to get your online ordering system started. Visit www.ordant.com

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