You should start by identifying the key person or people in upper management who will lead the whole change management and due-diligence process. His or her first responsibility will be to guide the process of defining the strategic business goals for the company as they reflect themselves in the Print MIS system. The team leader will oversee the project and maintain the larger view, while managing the business and production process changes needed to properly implement the system.

You will then assemble a team comprised of the users from the key areas of your shop, who will help you determine the precise capabilities needed in each part of your business. Such users will help you assess your current business practices and where the processes need to be changed. Do you need a dynamic scheduling system that can perform what-if scenarios? Are you planning for JDF compatibility with your prepress workflow system and production devices? Do you need a fulfillment module? This team will be the target of the prospective vendors’ hands-on demos.

Next, define the list of features you need, keeping in mind flexibility and growth. Prioritize the list by the modules most important to you—estimating, inventory, Web front-end, etc.—and then by the features within each module. The list needs to be quite detailed, not just a cursory sketch of functions.

You will then survey likely candidates by reviewing the product literature for the systems, talking with the vendors, and tapping industry knowledge of the companies themselves—the size of their development teams, their financial stability, their service agreements, etc. Keep an eye on any additional requirements and costs for building a properly robust MIS platform for the number of concurrent users you will have. Based on these requirements, weed out the systems that don’t meet your needs, pick half a dozen, and draft a request for proposal (RFP) to these. Based on an analysis of their responses, select two or three and invite them to do a demonstration of their system. The RFP will include detailed scripts for the business processes you will require them to walk through. If the vendors are serious contenders, they’ll have their MIS system all set up to execute these demo scripts before they come to your plant.

Next, designate the day for the demo, perhaps staggering the MIS team over the hours required for it—so production doesn’t suffer unduly—bringing in each member of the team only when their particular business process is being analyzed on the system. However, the team leader(s) should be there for the whole demo, maintaining the checklist of pros and cons and providing continuity.

Once you decide on the proper purchase, weighing all the pros and cons in the balance, you can use your feature/function priority list to help implement the system, prioritizing what goes first, what next, etc. Here’s where change management really comes into play.

Craig Press, president of Profectus Consulting, based in Sarasota FL, advises printers on MIS purchases. "If you buy a system and try to implement it the way you do business today, you’re going to fail," he warns. "You really need to look at the best practices built into the system and determine how you can leverage those best practices in your own business."

Core modules will be staged first, tested with offline data, and then brought online into actual deployment, with optional modules following after. Though full deployment can take months of hard work for mid-to-high-end systems, if you’ve done your work well the benefits will be soon apparent—both for the increased efficiency the MIS system provides and for the long-term strategic goals driving your business forward.

This concludes our Print MIS series. The September/October issue of DPS will feature an extended, print version of this article.