The whole picture: The importance of data and business intelligence

30 Juni 2025

Imagine trying to complete a jigsaw puzzle with half the pieces missing. You might have a rough idea of what you are trying to create, but you’ll never be able to see the full picture. Running a print business without proper data and business intelligence can pose the same difficulty.

Without real-time insights into costs, efficiency, and performance at every stage of production, decision-making becomes little more than guesswork, and guesswork in business is a costly gamble. So, here’s how to ensure you’re making smart, informed choices that drive profitability rather than drain resources.

Keep your eyes on the prize

Without the full picture, printers are opening a can of worms in the form of bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and poor customer experience without even realising it. Is artwork proofing taking three days to complete? Are materials being wasted because of inefficient designs? Are last minute jobs throwing your production workflow into a spin? Understanding that you’re facing these challenges is the first step to a more streamlined and efficient print workflow.

Let’s go back to artwork processing for a minute. When done manually, this crucial stage of any print job can consist of multiple print files and updating or changing artwork can very long to process, not to mention the excruciating back and forth that can occur during this stage. By being aware of how long each job in production is taking to process, print businesses can drill down on the problem areas and speed things up, opening up capacity for even more jobs - a win-win!

Now let’s look at your customer experience. Are customers becoming frustrated with long turnaround times, or waiting days to be updated on an order that you hadn’t even realised they’d placed? If this sounds familiar, your reputation and future jobs could be at risk. You can speed up your processes all you like, but not being aware of issues that are causing orders to come to a halt can do permanent damage to your reputation and relationships.

So, now you are starting to see the full picture, what are you going to do about what you see?

Dig deeper into the data

If you don’t analyse the data you are collecting about your business, you can’t be sure you’re producing your print jobs in the optimal way. For example, you’ve identified that a machine is down with orders still flowing in, but what you do with that information will be the determining factor between success and damaged relationships.

An MIS solution or a Business Intelligence tool can provide printers with a 360-degree view of their business and the ability to automatically address any inefficiencies or challenges within the flow. For example, you can set up your software to notify you of any machine downtime or abandoned customer orders, and your MIS will automatically halt any new orders whilst your engineers tackle the issue at hand.

Modern MIS systems and Business Intelligence tools will provide real-time insights in the form of a user-friendly dashboard providing data such as number of orders, quotes, pending orders, order conversions, and more. This makes information easy to access and simple and straightforward to act on.

There are a number of apps and plug-ins designed to provide printers with a holistic and modular approach to business analysis. Take Enfocus Switch, which offers a modular range of apps to choose from. IdleAlert, for example, ensures that jobs passing through within a chosen time frame are checked and an alert is sent if no activity is detected.

Another option is FlowSpy, which gives printers a window into their production workflow, including which jobs pass through and when they pass through with the app logging the information specified such as what countries orders are coming from.

Maximising success with automation

One company that has benefitted from being data-driven is online printer Solopress. In 2019, Solopress began its journey to remove repetitive tasks and implement automation - a large number of time-consuming tasks such as artwork checks and updates were being carried out manually, requiring experienced operators to stand in front of computers for long periods of time.

Working with Four Pees, Solopress evaluated its production flows and identified areas that were time-consuming and manual tasks that could be automated, utilising tools like Enfocus Switch to do so. The result? Since 2019, when looking at the revenue divided by all the hours worked in the business, Solopress has seen a 76% improvement in productivity.

By exploring inefficiencies and analysing the whole picture, the company was able to see the areas of the business that could benefit from improvement, and tasks that took minutes to perform now take seconds.

This is a textbook example of the opportunities to boost revenue that can easily be missed when a business takes its eyes off the road. In order to truly maximise potential and profitability, start by understanding your business’ data inside out, then use that knowledge to drive smarter, faster, and more strategic decisions.