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At the Queen's Printer,
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When Dawson Brenner became Director of Print Services at the Queen’s Printer, Victoria, B.C. 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 digital printing and short run litho work. It also had a highly experienced print production planning area that directed work to the most efficient source whether that was in-house or to pre-qualified suppliers in the private sector.
An area of concern, he discovered, was its Print MIS system. The organization uses SAP enterprise resource planning and accounting system, but it doesn’t provide a print operation module, so the print shop used a shop loading system but it hadn’t been updated in many years. Getting those two systems to communicate required some data to be entered twice, and the Queen’s Printer wanted to expand its customer relationship management capabilities by keeping notes on jobs that would be easily accessible to all production planning staff. Critical knowledge about current and repeated jobs was in people’s heads, rather than in one system that could be shared.
“It was imperative that we update our Print MIS system to ensure continuity of information and expertise”, Brenner said.
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. Procurement and Supply Services manages purchasing, warehousing, mail, distribution, disposal of surplus assets, publishing of legislation and other publications, and other operations. The print shop has about 55 employees at its main plant in Victoria and operates on a cost recovery basis where customers are charged for the services and products they receive. The prices are set to offset the costs of paper, printing supplies such as ink and plates, building leases, labor, systems and administrative support.
The existing but old system had some complex customized integrations to other systems, and when the Queen’s Printer issued a Request for Proposals to replace it, two proposals were received.
Avanti was chosen as the best overall fit, Brenner said, and 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 is also a Xerox Business Partner, with Avanti’s Graphic Arts Management System certified as Optimized for Freeflow. This enabled a seamless integration with Xerox print on demand systems, which are used at the Queen’s Printer . As part of the solution, Queens Printing added Xerox FreeFlow Web Services and Process Manager, to automate job submissions via a Web storefront.
SAP integrations are not trivial, and this one, implemented jointly by Avanti and the Procurement and Supply Services’ IT staff, took a little longer than expected. “Overall it went quite well,” Brenner said. “The Avanti-Xerox partnership absolutely helps. It’s not like you’re starting from square one.” Brenner was complimentary of Avanti when he said, “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 more information available for creation of quotes, Brenner said.
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 Freeflow Print Servers into the Avanti system. The Avanti chargeback module produces the monthly billing of customers, where it’s 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 said, “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 Queens Printing 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.”