Digital Output - March 2008 - (Page 20)

companies mentioned RS# 100 101 102 103 104 105 COMPANY Cyrious Software WEB SITE www.cyrious.com Durst Image Tech. U.S. www.durstusa.com EFI Mimaki USA, Inc. Océ North America Pace Systems Group www.efi.com www.mimakiusa.com www.oceusa.com www.pace2020.com “We started by creating an implementation team that comprised members from a number of departments—our CFO represented accounting, our production managers, and of course, myself, as the implementation lead. From the start, I knew we had the power and the motivation to make it succeed. We weren’t trying to push anything uphill,” Richman confides. “We purchased the system in the spring of that year, and within three months, we went live.” ProlabWest currently runs a wide variety of digital print engines—a Durst Lamda, an Océ LightJet, and two VUTEk engines. “Not long after we purchased EFI Logic, we learned that EFI acquired VUTEk, and were thrilled that there would be some good synergy between the software and our equipment.” MIS Implementation: A Tough Nut to Crack created systems for the commercial printer, but those were designed around fixed-sheet-size operations. These don’t apply to the average sign business because just about every job that comes through the door is unique. It’s not as though sign makers are able to concentrate on making brochures all day, tens of thousands at a time.” “This business changes so quickly,” Gillispie qualifies. “Products change, machines change, workflow changes. And the more static a software solution is, the more difficult it is to modify, the harder it is for your business to adapt and grow. It becomes a scenario where you’re working for the system and the system should be working for you.” Representing all company disciplines—sales, estimating, production, and general business management—six members of the staff were among the first users. “Immediately, our staff took to it, finding it superior to the previous manual processes that they were hungry for us to add new modules,” Gillispie recalls. “We were completely off paper within three or four months.” “We’ve always seen our tool as a way to drive sales. Production management is important, too, because you want to drive profitability—of which there are two components,” explains St. Cyr. “First, there’s the cost. Production management is always about knowing your costs, being able to control your costs, and using the right production tool to minimize costs.” “The second part is sales,” St. Cyr continues. “Profitable companies tend to be those that are focused on a high level of customer service. So, you need the tools that will allow you to do things like give pricing information quickly and manage the total customer relationship.” Room to Grow proved quite challenging, as it not only required an incredible investment in prepress, print, and finishing systems, but also a commitment to completely transform the way business was conducted.” “We knew we needed a time and materials solution in order to manage this new business. It was no longer as simple as processing film and making prints,” Richman recalls. “We had a custom, proprietary system that handled everything from quotes to purchasing, from jobs to accounting. But it grew old and antiquated, and ran on a SKU system, which was no longer applicable.” “So, we went in search of a system that would help us manage this new business more efficiently,” Richman continues. “One of our primary requirements was that it empower our sales people—or enable the sales team—to remotely input information about job specifications, using online tools— and then have that information flow all the way through the system.” ProlabWest selected EFI’s Logic to do the job. A fully integrated system, EFI Logic streamlines communications and helps print companies to harness, control, and capitalize on data by managing such disparate yet related processes as estimating, billing, shipping, purchasing, and inventory control. According to the developer, EFI Logic is well suited for medium to large print operations running anything from sheetfed and web offset presses to large format shops—even for a hybrid mix of the two. “Implementation can be very daunting,” Richman remarks. “Luckily for us, the decision to bring in EFI Logic was top-down. We were already making drastic changes to our business, so it made perfect sense from a timing perspective.” It was 2004 when Steve Gillispie acquired Richmond, VA-based Acorn Sign Graphics, a shop that began manufacturing signs in the early ’80s. Today, Acorn caters to a customer base of more than 3,000 businesses that need everything from architectural and environmental signage to trade show graphics and simple vinyl banners, courtesy of two digital inkjets—a Mimaki flatbed and a rollfed Mimaki JV3. “When I bought the company, all of the ordering and job tracking was done on a paper system, with handwritten orders,” Gillispie recalls. “Surprisingly, it was a fairly efficient system; still, there were problems with inconsistencies in how customer and job information was captured, how quotes were written up, and how production information was written. And then there was the challenge of job tracking and getting up-to-the-minute status reports if we— or the customer—needed to know where, or how far along, a job was.” Gillispie began to envision a better way of managing the print business and mentally constructed the ideal MIS for Acorn Sign Graphics. “If a new software system can mimic the way people are already working, the more acceptance and compliance you’ll get from the staff,” Gillispie confides. “So that was very important to us. “We also needed an efficient way to capture customer information, so that the job could be invoiced properly and sent to the right stages of production and a really effective customer database married to a production system,” he explains. After significant research into what the marketplace was offering, Acorn Sign Graphics chose Cyrious Control, developed by Cyrious Software. St. Cyr developed Cyrious Control to suit the business management needs of a sign-making business he previously co-owned with his brother, Steve. His brother continues to operate Vivid Ink in Baton Rouge, but Scott now focuses entirely on the software company. “Our product line runs the gamut—interior and POP displays, vehicle and building wraps, signs, banners, and fine-art reproduction,” explains Jay Boatright, general manager, Digitech Graphics Group, Lakeland, FL. Boatright joined the company in early 2004, following a period of time when the company experienced serious growth, which prompted management to rethink its current business management systems. “The system we had in place in 2004 had no production management tools at all,” Boatright recalls. “With the new system, we had a specific price range in mind, obviously, but it was much more important to find a solution that provided some form of production tracking.” “As a team, [we] have some programming experience,” he continues. “We pieced together a band-aid system to manage and track production, but it was very cumbersome and not very effective for a shop of www.digitaloutput.net Output created by Digitech Graphics Group. The company uses Cyrious Software’s Cyrious Control. “There were really no other systems for the large format space,” St. Cyr recalls. “Several developers 20 Digital Output March 2008 http://www.cyrious.com http://www.durstusa.com http://www.efi.com http://www.mimakiusa.com http://www.oceusa.com http://www.pace2020.com http://www.digitaloutput.net

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Digital Output - March 2008

Digital Output - March 2008

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