Question : Screen Printing / Art Department Resource Scheduling and Organization

We are a fairly large custom screen printer with a staff of approximately 35 computer users. 10 are inside sales reps, 10 are in house artists, 5 are admin people, and the rest fall into various other categories.

Among these users we have various art files that are shared, accessed and created on a daily basis. Sales reps use jpg images of production jobs as a sales and marketing tool. Admin uses jpg images for art approvals.

Artists create a multitude of production on a daily basis and and associated with these are reference images, company created and purchased clipart, as well as various jpg exports for use with sales, admin, web dev, etc.

Surrounding this is the actual workflow. Orders come in from sales, are approved scheduled by admin, are checked in by the art dept, reference is located and they are worked on by an artist until complete.

The problems with this system are many, starting with NetSuite, an ERP/CRM that was never intended to be used in the screen printing industry, to the log jam we regularly experience with getting art work scheduled, through the art dept. and onto a printing press.

This brings up two questions I would like to ask.

1. Has anyone used or aware of an application designed specifically for managing a screen print shop? Our current CRM/ERP, NetSuite, does not permit us to process orders through the system, does not easily allow us to associate job files and images with customers, and does not permit us to effectively schedule our art.

We have looked at some of the apps like Impress which are geared towards screen printing and embroidery but it still seems like it may pose some problems in our moving leads and prospects over to customers. We are aware that there is a Goldmine plugin but this seems like going right back in the same direction as NetSuite.

2.  Can anyone recommend a method or an art management application for dealing with gigabytes worth of associated data? As I mentioned above, our jobs are created by artists, often using additional resources located on various shares or servers. Once the jobs are created, they then generate additional jpg images for a variety of uses.

Along with this is our reference and clip art archives. Clipart is sorted categorically but is over 35 gigabytes. Reference is stored in "customer folders" Ideally we would like to associated any file, including sales orders, approvals, etc with the original art file.

We have explored Version Cue and Extensis Portfolio but due the sheer volume of art files and resources, we do not want to get into doing the work with a trial version only to find that it will not fit our needs.

Any help with this matter is greatly appreciated.

Answer : Screen Printing / Art Department Resource Scheduling and Organization

I worked in a printing company with ~40 users; 5-7 were artiststs, eventually 2 more added for electronic pre-press only.

The main MRP system in use was PSI, now owned by EFI.  EFI has been acquiring a lot of ERP systems, including PrintSmith, Hagen, & Logic.

My last exposure was about 5 years ago, and the front office and production still ran separately.  Estimates, jobs, shipments, invoices were all front office.

Production shifted to mostly digital (no more film & stripping), and was managed by Creo Prinergy.

Neither of these systems was a trial download.  They required a minimum of one server (PSI) or multiple (Prinergy) and significant training just to get through the installation.

I understand the frustration.  Trying to get everything linked to everything else is a great dream, but probably not a reality.  Definitely not in the "trial version" level of software.

When I was still there, we used a lot of storage space archiving old jobs (in whole) to remove them from the system.  We could go back to the originals, working files, and final files and copy them into a new production job.  But, keeping them online just was not practical (or economical).

Hierarchical storage helped migrate old files off the RAID to tape or DVD.  Front-office (MRP) database kept track of the job numbers, so we could search on job# to find the old files and bring them back online.

A lot of people are scared of dropping $50K or more on an MRP system or a print production system (the two are not the same thing).  But that's less than the cost of one full-time employee doing traffic & customer service.

Have you looked at the big guys like PSI & Hagen yet for the front-office?  How about Creo on the production side?