Printers look to their software to improve profitability

By Alan Alexander of Calprint Systems Pty Ltd

As the printing industry becomes increasingly competitive, companies are looking to get more from their software and supplier to help maintain a competitive edge. The areas where there has been most interest have been in more features, increased reporting and cost recoveries.

Many printing businesses have been adding digital to complement their traditional offset business; or they may be expanding in other areas such as forms management. They may also be looking for improvements in customer service through internet applications or improvements in production through JDF. In any case, they are looking to their software to fulfill any new requirements that they may have. Quote & Print has the facilities for this. There are a couple of methods of quickly adding digital quotes, there is a recently released new version of QPONLINE for internet applications and JDF is being implemented on some sites. There are also some new features released with V8 like an SMS facility for quotes and jobs.

Customers are always looking to get more information from their software to improve their profitability. In Quote & Print software, new reports are regularly being added and the report generator has been improved with the introduction of child/parent reporting. You don't have to be a programmer to run the report generator and there have been requests to add more of these. In the recently released V8 of Quote & Print, there is a customisable menu structure and this allows grouping particular reports in the one area via better navigation through the system. There is also a module that allows any standard report to be exported to Excel.

When it comes to cost recoveries, there have been an increased number of requests to discover what these are in order to determine machine rates. This is driven by the ever-tightening competition in the industry and with less room for error, businesses are looking closer at their margins. In Quote & Print there are a number of reports that can be used to find machine efficiency rates. In conjunction with these reports, Quote & Print has a module specifically designed to help determine these machine rates.

So when customers look to their software to improve efficiencies in these or other areas, Quote & Print will be there. Designed with the attitude that the software should not be over-complicated, easy to install, easy to train and easy to use; but still have enough flexibility to satisfy most requirements, Quote & Print allows vendors to concentrate on proper training and implementation that best suits the client's requirements.