locked-up by your production process?

all-inclusive print management solutions including features such as quotation, sending files, online validation of printing work, manage to make life easier for marketing/communication teams but also to making them dependent of their publishing platforms’ print management solutions.

If the comfort and security brought by these tools is largely and daily appreciated by marketing teams, they reach their limit when it comes to monitoring purchasing and costs on a TCO basis, and to keeping precise track of the production process.
Therefore, it becomes essential to assess the scope of work and functionalities requested by marketing teams in order to properly specify and chose the adapted solution.

No matter how tempting it might be to choose a solution supplied by one’s publishing platform, these solutions remain limited when it comes to properly analyzing and monitoring cost of production for marketing materials and total cost of ownership :

• Such tools do not allow for production work to originate from other companies than the publishing platform,
• They can be limited in the evolution of their functionalities, restricted and centered around the supplier’s process and operational requirements,
•  Purchasing and cost monitoring remain limited in the depth of their functionalities through those tools.

Today, many new functional and technical developments allow for large external complex data originating from various sources to be synchronized into one tool/platform with “user friendly” interfaces maintaining combined access to existing functionalities.
At the same time, these tools can follow strict corporate purchasing policies and allow marketing teams to remain independent from their various production suppliers (publishing platform, etc…). These new tools can handle the following tasks:

• Suppliers and traffic management according to rate cards negotiated by purchasing team,
•  Electronic validation (from quotes to orders) and Online management of the suppliers and tasks management depending on the constraints or the price list previously defined in the purchasing policy,
• Automatically sending and validating ready to print pdf documents and receipt slips in order to increase the tracking capacity of the processes,
• Extensive data aggregation in order to offer ad hoc dashboards for production, financial reporting for instance.

On top of all this, last but not least … corporations having already independently deploy ERP, PIM, DAM tools should keep in mind that their long-term independence will depend on their ability to master in-house independent.