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Printing Industry

Printing

The complex challenges of the printing and graphic arts industry can be effectively addressed with Priority's end-to-end ERP solution. Whether your focus is on manufacturing or distribution, Priority offers you a proven solution to increase productivity and profitability and meet the growing demands of this industry, including businesses involving multiple products in the areas of flexible packaging, labels, cartons, commercial print and more. Priority will help you coordinate complex projects, manage vendors and subcontractors, track and maintain procurement, operations and material management as well as retrieve real-time information about schedules and costs. Using Priority you can deliver fast turnarounds on quotations and jobs as well as provide cost and pricing information based on multiple run quantities. Maintain shorter product lifecycles, manage equipment and facilities such as presses, control tight supply chain management and effectively handle multi-unit measurements, such as would be incurred with dyes, inks and sheet stock. Repetitive manufacturing is our forte, and extensive BI capabilities including slice & dice as well as drill down data views allow you to analyze financial results without the additional investment required for external BI software.

Industry Targeted Functionality

  • Actual costing methods and COGS with accurate burdening (fixed or variable models)
  • Commission calculation and tracking per job
  • Extensive CRM capabilities
  • Job tracking for estimated vs. actual costs to calculate actual margins
  • Quality assurance
  • Rapid estimating configurator for price quote requests
  • Conversion of price quotes to customer orders and print dockets
  • Inventory control of paper rolls and sheets
  • Integrated labor reporting
  • Advanced planning and scheduling (APS)

Issues & Solutions

Comparing Vendor Price Quotations

Priority enables you to link a number of price quotes to a purchase requisition (PR) document and compare them, in order to choose the best proposal. In addition, linking the quotes to a PR enables supervision within public institutions, to ensure that the winning vendor for the PR is chosen properly.

Blanket Purchase Orders

Priority enables you to record blanket purchase orders, which offer special pricing terms in exchange for a commitment to purchase a specified quantity of parts within a set time frame. The blanket order acts as a basis for the production of multiple purchase orders. The system provides a means of tracking the remaining quantity in the blanket order, as well as the monetary value of the order balance.

Maintaining a Set of Operations Suitable for Multiple Parts

Priority enables you to maintain a library of "routings". A routing is a sequence of production operations conducted in work cells (e.g., departments or machines in the factory).
You can attach a specific routing to multiple parts, saving you having to define it again from scratch for each individual part.

Combining Requests for a Specific Part in Work Orders

Combining Requests for a Specific Part in Concentrated Work Orders.
For example, you wish to ensure that work orders for a specific part are opened at a maximum rate of one per month, due to the part's lengthy preparation procedures and machine set-up requirements.
You can set the MRP utility to open a single work order for all requests for a specific part that fall within a designated time frame for that part (demand range). Thus, if the demand range defined for part A is one week, the MRP utility will open one work order for all requests for part A that fall within the first week, a second work order for those requests that fall within the second week, etc.
Alternatively, you can determine that, for all parts, the MRP utility will open a single work order for all requests that fall within a given month (combining work orders on a monthly basis). In this case, a single work order is created for each requested part at the beginning of the month.

Determining Subcontractor Production Priorities

For each part, you can map out production priorities and capacities for various subcontractors.
 
Example:
For a specific part, you can define three subcontractors with the priorities 1, 2, and 3, and the capacities 300, 200, and 100. Based on the required quantity of the part, the MRP utility will generate individual work orders for each subcontractor, from the highest Priority subcontractor to the lowest.
Thus, if the required quantity is 200 units, the MRP utility will generate a single work order for 200 units to be produced by the first subcontractor (with a capacity of 300). If the required quantity is 700 units, the MRP utility will generate four work orders: one for 300 units to be produced by the first subcontractor, another for 200 units to be produced by the second subcontractor, a third for 100 units to be produced by the third subcontractor, and a fourth, for 100 units, once again to the first subcontractor.

Informing the Customer that Their Order is Ready

Priority's BPM utility lets you send an automated message to a customer or group of customers when a certain business rule is satisfied. For example, when a computer assembly is completed for a sales order, the customer receives an SMS letting them know that the computer is ready to be picked up.

Materials That Are Purchased by Weight And Processed In Sheets

Managing raw materials that are purchased from vendors by weight (kg) and maintained in the factory in sheets (e.g., sheet metal, sheet rock).
Priority allows you to manage a part in two different units, with a fixed conversion rate between them, where the first unit - in which the part is purchased - is based on weight, and the second unit - in which the part is processed internally - is in sheets (i.e., single part units). 
 
To do so, the following must be defined in the system:

  • The buy/sell unit - the unit commonly used in the market for parts of this type (in this case, "kg")
  • The factory unit (ea).

Throughout the purchasing process - vendor price quotes, purchase orders, invoices - the buy/sell unit is used.
In internal transactions, such as inventory counts, warehouse transfers and issues to the plant floor, the factory unit is used.
You can use alternate parts to define the sheet in a bill of materials, and to use sheets of various sizes in keeping with the factory's existing inventory.

Handling Deferred Income

In companies where income is distributed over a given time frame (e.g., for rental agreements, ongoing support), Priority enables automatic management of income distribution according to accepted accounting procedures over the period in question (the rental period, the service agreement). By reporting the period covered when billing the customer, the system divides the total income into fiscal periods and at the same time records the payment under Deferred Income. Periodically, you run a program which moves the correct proportional amount from the total Deferred Income payment to the appropriate income entry.