What is the difference between CRM, DAM, ERP and MIS, and why you should integrate them with W2P

For maximum productivity in web-to-print (W2P), it is necessary to integrate the online sales portal with other business management systems. In some cases these will already exist within the print service provider’s business, and in others they may be added later, but either way, it is valuable to understand how they work and what benefits W2P integration would bring.

CRM:

Customer relationship management tools support the sales role by recording all customer contacts, whether they are sales or service related. From this information, a CRM system can generate follow-up calls or other contacts and generate promotional offers for current and potential customers, backed by a record of past purchase history and notes on any issues.

Feeding W2P activity information into a CRM system is an obvious step, as it is important that all customer interaction and purchase activity be visible within the print service provider’s organization. This not only gives sales and management staff a more comprehensive view of how much business a customer is doing with the printer, but also insight into how they prefer to interact: is W2P sales tracking sales visits, calls, or email promotions, for example? or do they tend to occur independently of them?

This information can also provide suggestions for the maintenance and development of the W2P portal itself. If initial W2P orders are followed by a reversion to phone, fax or email orders, for example, this may mean that the portal isn’t user-friendly enough or doesn’t support the type of work the customer wants to do. .

DAM:

Digital asset management systems have been around for a while, predating the widespread broadband internet, and were often used to provide access to high-resolution image libraries for graphic designers, advertising agencies, and magazine or catalog publishers, with online interfaces for images. selection. Today, they can also store master design documents, images, and graphics that are frequently used by template-based W2P clients.

A value-added service that can link customers to your printer, a DAM system can be integrated with a W2P portal to allow access to the correct templates, images, and graphics during online construction of template-based jobs. For display speed, low-resolution RGB images are often used to provide the client preview; when the job is approved for printing, these are replaced by high-resolution print-ready CMYK versions, a task that can be automated with proper integration between the W2P portal and DAM.

Any W2P system that includes template-based job creation will by default have some degree of DAM functionality, which should suffice if you’re starting from scratch. If a DAM system exists, integration with the W2P portal may be possible to avoid duplication, or it may be easier to transfer the relevant files to the W2P system.

ERP and MIS:

Enterprise resource planning and management information systems, often used interchangeably, largely overlap in planning and executing jobs more efficiently, managing quotes, job numbering, planning and scheduling , allocation and use of resources (both mechanical and human) and consumables and restocking, finishing, shipping and billing. In addition to improving customer service through more accurate quoting and job tracking, ERP and MIS help printers gather business intelligence through customer data analysis and can play a useful role in achieving compliance with requirements. environmental and quality standards.

MIS solutions, the type most familiar to most printers, provide cost analysis based on ink usage, production time, media usage, and waste. This analysis can be extended to the performance of materials, equipment and operators, as well as stock management and the generation of invoices and delivery notes. Some MIS vendors provide CRM functionality as a module or web connectivity to MIS. Sales staff are also supported through mobile access to MIS, making it possible to quote and book jobs from the customer site.

While MIS offerings typically provide results that can be used with financial systems, ERP solutions differ in that they typically also provide financial tools, which can include CRM, HR, and payroll. ERP advocates point out that this all-in-one approach avoids the potential pitfalls inherent in connecting disparate systems from multiple vendors, and can avoid problems by alerting users to situations such as customers who have exceeded their credit limits or payment terms. before more jobs are accepted. for instance.

Tight integration of MIS or ERP systems with W2P allows online customers to benefit from automated pricing, ordering, job scheduling and status visibility, while providing reliable WIP information to the printer for control production, profitability analysis and cash flow planning.