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The heart of a company’s Business infrastructure is a good ERP (aka MIS) system. This system is crucial to any print production business. While a notepad or an Excel spreadsheet, may suffice for smaller companies, there is a point at which it becomes very difficult to manage a company with those tools
Additionally, as a printing company expands and business requirements change, an existing MIS system may no longer keep up with those changes and continue to provide the necessary support.
Associated Printing Production (APPi) founded 1991 is located in Miami Lakes Florida. It is a Sheetfed Offset and Digital promotional and packaging products company, producing a wide variety of different products with different requirements. According to APPi President John Beadle, “as a forward-thinking company, we have always believed in the importance of a good MIS system”.
They initially installed Pace, their first system, not long after starting the business and it supported the critical functions in their business for years, even as their business changed. However, as their business changed, so did the computing landscape and ePace, a browser-based version was introduced to replace Pace. Since it didn’t offer the same flexibility as the older system, APPi decided to stick with the existing Pace system even though it meant staying on the unsupported Windows XP platform. Pace Systems was eventually acquired, and APPi decided to migrate to the newly introduced Monarch system. According to Beadle and VP Peter Lundberg, who was instrumental in the initial Pace implementation, “this implementation was a very long and painful process that never seemed to end”. They increasingly found themselves having to use ‘workarounds’ to support their needs. As a result, they went back to their original Pace system on the unsupported computing platform.
About 4 years ago, two brothers who have a printing company in Chile stopped by APPi to see how a US printing company operates. They showed Beadle the system they were using and how the plant was doing on their mobile phone, and he was impressed but didn’t hear from them for about 3 years. At that point, since the two brothers had already installed their TWIST system in many plants around the globe they asked if he would be interested helping them translate it to English and refine it to the US market. Since Beadle knew that trying to keep their existing Pace system running on Windows XP was a risky endeavor, he said he would give it a try, and assigned the very experienced Lundberg as the point person.
Properly implementing an MIS system requires some time and experience. The implementation has to be a close partnership between the MIS vendor and the print service provider. The TWIST translation project started in March 2019 and they were ready to start loading the APPi data and testing the new language version in November. The TWIST team was actively involved in the implementation. They migrated all of the old APPi data from Pace, worked with paper vendors to upload catalogs and pricing into the new system, and by February APPi stopped using Pace and used TWIST exclusively.
Unlike previous implementations, this transition was completely different, it was calm and effective. The TWIST team is “responsive and very open to making improvements”, without having to go through a customer consensus process. TWIST uses an Internal chat system to communicate with their customers and collect questions, concerns, etc. If no one there to answer immediately they send detailed responses and even ‘how to’ videos instructing customers very quickly.
As it turned out, the timing was fortuitous. The pandemic hit and they were ready. Since it is a user-friendly cloud-based system, Lundberg could work from home, the General Manager scheduled the plant from home. It actually brought a lot of engagement across the entire company. People can enter, approve, interact and check status of jobs from anywhere on an ipad, phone, computer. According to Beadle, “the system just works, and it pushed us years ahead”.