What to look for when buying a new Management Information System

Phil Hayes of Orelia Management Systems shows how to road test a new MIS so that it will deliver what you require.

When trying to decide whether to buy a software package a company needs to ask a few key questions. You wouldn’t buy a car without a road test, or without checking if it had sufficient horsepower under the bonnet. Why settle for less with an investment that could decide the future success of your business?

I want consistency, how do I get it?

To gain consistency we need a set of constants that can be used in a flexible manner to gain a reliable outcome. Quote & Print gives the user the ability to input a company structure, its costs and budgets, so that when it is used by the staff a consistent outcome is achieved. It also contains the tools to calculate costs for hourly return, report on trends and to monitor win/loss ratios.

Do I have flexibility?

Fortunately printing businesses are not clones of each other. We all work to try and achieve the saying, ?work smarter, not harder. If we have gained an edge over our competitors by whatever means be it efficiencies through technology, sales skills or maybe even buying power, will a system be flexible enough to accommodate this?

Quote & Print through its security modules allows a company to effectively lock away from users the ability to massage the critical data. However, for key personnel the ability remains to adjust anything entered into the system, for example; price increases to stock and materials, changes to overheads, machine speeds and specifications.

What about integration?

Each of Quote & Print’s modules is designed to fully integrate with each other. When a company buys Q&P the trainers at the preinstall meeting will ask such questions as to your aspirations and the future direction of your company. Armed with this information they are then able to structure your training and data input so that when you choose to add additional modules the benefits will be immediately available.

Other companies are highly protective of their programming so this in itself restricts us from being able to integrate with third party software products. However, to overcome some of these difficulties Q&P has a number of export tools in its armoury that will allow us to retrieve data from the Quote & Print software and import into other products should the need arise.

Orelia Management Systems is the distributor of Quote & Print Software in Western Australia.