The difference between running a successful business and one that struggles to keep its head above water is not so much in terms of how much money is made, but how it is spent that really matters. In essence, the more efficient your business is when it comes to management, the more potential for success it has over the long term.
The leaner your methods for planning, manufacturing, tracking, and distribution are, the less expensive it is to run your facility. For manufacturers, the goal is to streamline the entire production and fulfillment process from start to finish and every step in the way to get greater output at a lower cost.
For the purposes of this article, we are going to focus on print manufacturers, which are typically an integral part of the marketing supply chain.
Every printer has unique requirements based on the market, verticals and customers they serve. That said, there is no one solution that fits the needs of every printer. Today, let’s list the features the ideal marketing supply chain solution should have. The marketing supply chain solution every printer wishes was out there.
With inexpensive “pay-as-you-go” software options in the market that require no maintenance or hosting, it’s easy to attain better margins and profits that come from reduced manual labor, error, waste and overall greater efficiency and productivity.
But the ideal marketing supply chain solution goes beyond that. I’m talking about optimizing your production logistics while also tapping into customer satisfaction and wrap it all together into one single application. An application that gives you leaner production but also turns customers into raving fans. Software that handles the entire supply chain and produces more customers and makes them stay longer. The ultimate marketing supply chain solution to grow your business.
So, let’s dive into the features that make up the ideal marketing supply chain solution.
1. Total Production Management
The ideal marketing supply chain solution for your business must include total production management –giving you the ability to streamline and coordinate all aspects of operations, including manufacturing, procurement, order and inventory management, kitting, pick and pack, and distribution.
The system should be built for any kind of product, regardless of where it’s produced or shipped from. The system needs to handle anything from a simple business card order to an extremely complex marketing kit of customized printed products and inventoried promotional items.
To optimize production logistics, the ideal marketing supply chain solution must include the following features.
Total Production Management: Handle any workflow. JIT, warehoused inventory, drop shipping, print on demand, kitting, combination of all.
Efficient Procurement Management: Complete procurement workflow that easily consolidates and organizes demand for a simple procurement process.
Complete Warehouse Management System (WMS): Handle all of your warehouse locations, inventory, pick and pack, and order flow in one place.
Robust Reporting : Access to visual dashboards, stock reports and the ability to perform ad-hoc reporting to see exactly what is going on.
Planning and Forecasting: Forecast demand and plan inventory for the next wave of demand to stay proactive and avoid running out of stock.
Control: Administer and configure every aspect of the system through a standard web browser and intuitive interface.
Solution Benefits
- Reduce manual transactions
- Increase inventory accuracy
- Improve customer satisfaction
- Speed time to market
- Gain visibility
Like I said, the ideal marketing supply chain solution for your business is built with consumers in mind. The ideal solution takes care of trimming production costs and grow revenue. The next components are for your clients.
2.Intelligent Marketing Portals
Regardless of the end product, regardless if you produce it or someone else does, the ideal marketing asset management solution for your business must allow your clients to bring all their marketing products under a single portal including print, promo, apparel and digital products.
It does not matter how many users log in into the system to order products, the system must offer your clients with the ability to protect their brand, budget and inventory. That is, marketing portals that give them absolute control on what creative elements are locked-down and which ones can be personalized. Control on what needs approval before it is sent to production, and control on how much, how many and how frequent users can order.
To bring new customers, tap into new vertical markets and turn customers into raving fans, the ideal marketing supply chain solution must include the following features.
Features
- Consolidate all marketing products into one platform.
- Maintain brand integrity across their entire marketing portfolio.
- Ensure budgets align with corporate goals.
- Set approval workflows to ensure compliance.
- Simplify how users access, find, and order corporate marketing assets.
- Manage production and fulfillment of all assets through a single platform.
3.Powerful Web-to-Print Engine
The ideal solution must feature a powerful web-to-print system that allows your clients to eliminate the guesswork of inventory management and reduce overhead by only printing what they need. A robust and intuitive personalization engine must be present allowing users to personalize print and check out quickly.
Design Templates: Stationery, signage, brochures, flyers and any other creative assets your clients’ use must be easily be uploaded to the system as templates to facilitate and speed the creative process.
Free Editing: Based on the nature of the piece, text, images or personal contact information must be left unlocked so sales teams and other employees can customize creative with personal information, messages, offers, urls and more.
Brand Compliance: Control settings and permissions must be available to control which materials users can access, how and what content can be customized, and whether approval is required on the final piece before it is submitted to production.
4.Digital Asset Management
The ideal marketing supply chain solution also must include digital asset management capabilities. It comes to no surprise that most of your clients will also work with digital files that must be made available to employees.
This component must allow your clients to share their digital assets with colleagues, employees, partners, and any other important players in their corporate pipeline.
That is, bring all their digital assets under a single repository and allow their users to find, covert, and download what they need from anywhere they are.
5.Robust Reporting
Information is power and the ideal marketing supply chain solution must provide real time reporting on exactly what is going on your facility, (open orders, new orders, late orders, orders status) and your clients with information on what is on demand, what is being order the most and how much users are ordering.
But any marketing supply chain solution can already do that. The ideal marketing supply chain solution takes it further by making it easier to analyze, manage and share crucial information.
Visual dashboards: Quick and intelligent snap shots of different areas of a storefront. These reports are easy to read and share with others. Users must be able to edit as well as create their own dashboards.
Here are some examples of what I am taking about
- Top 10 inventory parts in demand
- Top 10 order spending by user
- Top 10 most ordered parts
- Top 10 low stock parts
- Popular part categories
- Order by state/country
- Frequently used carriers
- Average order cost
- Average order turn around
- Demand by items type / commodity code
Stock reports: Standard reports to get new clients going and get them a base to go on. This reports must allow your clients to drill into order and shipment details, part usage, inventory details and more.
Customized reports: Your clients must have the ability to add/remove data, filter by user or groups, change the order/sort and even summarize different fields.
Schedule Reports & Automate Delivery: Your clients must also have the ability to automate delivery of any report via email or ftp, to management in a variety of formats (XLS, CSV, PDF, etc). Users should also be able to schedule reports to gain insight into selective periods of time such as, monthly, quarterly, or annual reports and automatically have them sent to anybody’s inbox.
Inventory Alerts: The ideal marketing supply chain solution has your back and alerts you of upcoming inventory discrepancies. Automatic alert notifications should be sent out to your clients on any parts when stock runs low to prevent product back orders.
Takeaway
By making small improvements across the entire system from ordering to final delivery, you can greatly increase the efficiency of your production methods and thus put more money into other important endeavors such as machinery, new hires, and marketing.
There are a number of other features which also adds value to the ultimate production system. But the point is to focus on having your business run at peak efficiency, so you can then turn your efforts towards expanding your customer and client base. The right software allows you to turn your company around and make it the most efficient possible so that you can get the most out of your business efforts.