Use Your Production Data to Improve Efficiency and Your In-plant

By: Elisha Kasinskas

RSA recently sponsored an IPMA webinar called, “What Data Matters in 2020?” (session replay and slides available in the IPMA member community) where Keypoint Intelligence offered three steps for in-plants to be successful this year (know your “numbers,” find growth applications and optimize production) based on findings from in-plant and PSP responses to their 2020 North American Software Investment Outlook survey.

I wanted to expand on the topic, in particular “knowing your numbers” and optimizing production.

Keypoint Intelligence noted in the research report that “Printers experiencing growth typically have processes and software solutions in place to collect, monitor, and react to operational and financial indicators. The differences between growing and declining business [based on sales] appear to favor companies that can monitor more often and respond more quickly to leading (instead of historical) indicators. …Keypoint Intelligence’s Production Workflow service believes that shops that can accurately capture business-critical data and implement corrective actions for continual improvement will be far better positioned over the coming decade.”

And yet, 46% of the in-plants who responded to the survey are manually tracking performance through job tickets and 13% of in-plants don’t track operational performance at all.

Knowing your “Numbers”

So where do you start if you are not collecting operational data? How do you automate the process so that you have the information continually at your fingertips? Ryan McAbee, Director for Keypoint Intelligence – InfoTrends’ Production Workflow Consulting Service offers three tips to start being more “data-driven” (manage by numbers and data rather than intuition):

Determine the what, why, how, who, and when of your data collection
Identify the tools you will use to collect the information and match the right software tool for the job to avoid duplicating efforts
Set the frequency for collecting the data.

Once you’ve set yourself up to collect data, then you can begin tracking and analyzing so you can make improvements.

Optimize Production and Increase Efficiency

In RSA’s new white paper, “Using your In-plant Data to Improve Efficiency” we show you how you can increase your efficiency by using your shop’s production data on an ongoing basis (our Web to print software, WebCRD does this automatically) to optimize production.