North American Printing Company
Private equity owned $500 million revenue North American print and print services company.
CHALLENGE
Develop a strategy for modernizing the IT systems and processes for customer and supplier collaboration, order management, and production planning for a $500 million private equity owned firm. Current systems were fragmented and ineffective, and some newer functionality like web-based version control, approval management, and on-demand digital print were not supported at all. Several competitors already had superior capabilities and customer’s expectations were growing. Plus, current fragmentation and use of work-arounds to mimic new functionality were increasingly costly.
Upgrading the information technology for the firm was critical, both for strategic competitive reasons and for improving profitability.
SOLUTION
Select best of breed package software and connect and integrate via custom development. Build a dedicated development team to run selection and create a development and implementation plan, plus build the business case quantifying the savings, revenue, and costs. Solution components selected were Kodak Insight for collaboration and pre-press, EFI Digital Storefront for Print on Demand, EFI Monarch for Print Management, Kodak Prinergy for Print workflow & RIPS, and NetSource for supplier collaboration. The board dedicated 80% of capital budget to the IT modernization program. The full system is now completed and in use; steps followed in the effort were:
Build business case for IT modernization for board
Analyze feasibility of best of breed solution combination
Develop full development and implementation plan
Negotiate licenses and development resources
Gain full board approval and spending commitment
Dedicate resources to building full process and system solutions for each functional area:
Pricing
Order capture & specification
Production order management
Planning
Graphics
Finance
IT systems infrastructure
Establish governance through a steering committee, meetings, reports, and metrics
The solution incorporated best of breed elements from Kodak, EFI, and Netsource into an industry leading architecture.
BENEFITS
Planning and executing the development and deployment was accomplished on time and on budget:
$4 million NPV and payback of 3.12 years
New Prinergy workflow management was deployed and working across North America in 12 weeks
New insight collaboration capability piloted for 12 weeks
New digital storefront print on demand capability was ready for new customer use in 24 weeks
New central control capability for price policy management and execution deployed in 24 weeks
Full solution now leads the industry for speed, efficiency, customer satisfaction, and comprehensive connectivity and collaboration
Initial benefits were accomplished in 12 weeks, the core functionality was deployed within 24 weeks, and the full system leads the industry.
