Many will have therefore rejoiced at the recent relaxation of the rules, with some airports and airlines allowing two items of hand luggage once again. According to a report on UK technology website IT Pro last month, Manchester airport’s ability to relax the one-bag rule was down to its efforts to improve operational efficiency through the use of business intelligence (BI) software.

Manchester airport began using BI to monitor its commercial performance, and subsequently realised it could use the same tools to pinpoint operational bottlenecks. By monitoring passenger and baggage flow trends the airport’s operator can forecast the effect of screening additional bags, and has been able to provide X-ray machines and staff to cope with the additional demand.

While that’s good news for anyone travelling to or from the North West, it also highlights the power of BI software, which is now starting to receive more attention in print as firms seek to get a better grip on their businesses and take advantage of the benefits that their management information systems (MIS) can provide.

But collecting the information is one thing: the big deal is how all that information is digested, processed and presented to help the management team run the business most effectively. The increasing importance of this information and how it is presented was highlighted by Pira’s former head of print, pre-press and printing technology John Birkenshaw in a seminar at last year’s MIS show, just before his retirement. “The snapshot and the monitoring of key performance indicators (KPIs) are important for showing when and where to apply management time,” explained Birkenshaw.

Appropriately enough for the earlier aviation analogy, two of the many ways of describing the display of KPIs in an easy to interpret graphical interface are the ‘cockpit’ and the ‘flight deck’, although refering to ‘dashboards’ and ‘executive information systems’ (EIS) is also common.

The concept is not in itself new. UK MIS firm Printpak has included a feature in its system to pull out salient data in a visual format for years, and managing director Norman Marks is at pains to point out that despite the recent revival of interest in the concept he has printers making use of the system today – whereas for most MIS vendors it’s one of the next big things that they plan to take the wraps off in the run-up to Drupa.

Deja vu
Anyone with a particularly good memory may recall similar claims about a new generation of MIS with added business intelligence were also made by a number of firms in the run-up to the last Ipex. While some people may be experiencing a feeling of deja vu, this time around it looks more likely that there will be a larger market for these products.

The biggest single reason for this is that, since Ipex, the Vision in Print (ViP) Management Information Systems Best Practice Study has been published, which has focused both printers’ and MIS suppliers’ minds.

“The ViP MIS guide is the most significant thing ever written on MIS,” says Pira’s Birkenshaw. “I know it has led to developments from MIS suppliers.”

Several vendors are working towards implementing ViP’s recommendations in their systems.
“We’re aligning Optimus 2020 with the findings of the ViP report and we’ve done a huge amount to make the suggested information available through Optimus Analysis,” says Optimus Group managing director Nicola Bisset. Optimus Analysis, the firm’s business intelligence module, has been redesigned with the findings of the ViP study taken into account, and is currently being beta tested.

Imprint Business Systems has also taken heed of the ViP study in developing the dashboard for its MIS. “Adding the KPIs was a big thing in terms of addressing the recommendations of the ViP report,” says chairman Jonathan Richards. “The KPIs we’ve chosen are very close to those recommended by ViP.”

Richard Gray, chief executive of ViP, is heartened by the MIS suppliers’ response to the report: “We’re delighted to see that a number of MIS vendors have responded to the ideas in the study. The dashboards and KPI reporting have to be good news in principle. The plans that one vendor has shared with us look very promising.”

The ViP study has even made an impact overseas in the implementation of Kodak’s Enterprise Management System (EMS), which is currently being launched in North America. EMS will be coming to Europe at Drupa with the first installations expected to be at the end of the year, most likely at a UK printer.

“I’ve been looking at the market for the past two years, and the breadth and depth of that report makes it a must-read,” says Kodak Graphic Communications Group product communications manager Louis Gordon. “It marks a path for the transition from pre- to post-global village and lays out a way for MIS to be used to enable that.”

What Gordon describes as the ‘transition to the global village’ is what the rest of us would call ‘increased competitive pressure’, but, however you describe it, the problem is the same.

New tools
“It was part of the printer’s mindset that print is a craft, but the economy has changed so much that you need new tools to be able to compete, including tools to help build up business knowledge,” he says. “The use of KPIs to access information instantly, and having daily, rather than monthly, reports is essential for a strong sense of the status of the company.”

EFI chief executive Guy Gecht claims that the power of information will be one of the five big themes of the forthcoming Drupa, alongside industry consolidation, digital printing, industrial printing and the environment. Gecht first introduced the concept of adding what EFI calls an executive information system (EIS) to its MIS back in 2005. In defining why an EIS is important, he quotes a message Bill Gates sent to Microsoft staff stating that the problem is not about possessing the underlying data, but in sifting that data and presenting people with meaningful information that helps them to make decisions about how to run their business.

Developments in software and the pressures faced by the industry are behind the recent efforts to supply more meaningful information from the MIS directly without the need to use a spreadsheet or report writer to interpret the data.

“We commonly have to come up with spreadsheets that take some information from the MIS and some other data to get relevant KPIs for our customers,” says ViP’s Gray.

New systems with built-in business intelligence functions promise to eliminate that additional work.
“At EMS beta site (at Massachussetts firm LaVigne) the chief operating officer told me that the strength of the system is in the access to the data,” says Kodak’s Gordon. “In the old days it was a chore to do a daily report, but EMS allows them to produce reports tailored to them.”

Simple to use
Optimus director of research and development Nigel Tyler says the company’s new software makes that customised approach possible. “Optimus Analysis gives a much better way of slicing and dicing the underlying data,” he says, adding: “We want it to be simple to use: you shouldn’t need a degree in computer science to be able to understand it.”

There are two big advantages of this new power to process the underling data: one is that it can be presented visually, making it easier to interpret that all-important trend data that the
ViP survey highlighted.

“It’s easier to see than a report and lets you view data in aggregate,” says EFI director of product management Chuck Gehman. “People have been surprised by what they found.”

The real beauty, though, is that you’re not restricted to just viewing the big picture – you can use that as a jumping-off point and go looking for the specifics, with the software doing the clever stuff in the background to help you find the answers.

“People are asking for very drilled-down details: per machine, per person, per job type,” says Optimus’ Tyler. “It’s getting that drilled down in a few clicks – that’s the difference between traditional reports and business intelligence.”

Or as Gehman puts it: “People are able to go from global information to local – it’s like Google Earth for your print factory.”

Business intelligence can be applied to all aspects of the business in sales, administration and production. On the financial side you can use it to reveal what sort of jobs and customers are the most and least profitable and to track those trends over time, at any time, and not just at the end of the month when the monthly report is generated. As Tyler says, it can be used to get detail to the nth degree on production, too.

While the historical stuff is extremely valuable for analysing the business and developing your strategy, the adoption of the dashboard or cockpit approach also helps with the tactical stuff and keeping on top of issues as they evolve within the business.

“You want to know something is happening the moment it goes wrong,” says Imprint’s Richards. “We flag up [in the dashboard] production issues such as the non-arrival of artwork. It gives you time to deal with it before it can become a problem.”

Optimus offers something similar in its Alerts module. “Alerts force feed people the information that they need to know. It’s information in your face,” says Bisset.

Everyday details
As well as the strategic and tactical issues, the development of dashboards and business intelligence tools has focused MIS providers on making sure everyone has a personalised window into the system showing them what they need to know. While fighting fires and forecasting are important and powerful tools, sometimes it’s the mundane things that prove to be most valuable, which is something Gordon says Kodak has considered in the interface and operation of EMS. “It’s not just dashboards,” he says. “It’s having a task manager to ensure things don’t fall through the cracks.”

Whether it is in light of the ViP report, advances in technology or changes in the market making printers look at how they can get a better handle on their businesses, it’s clear management information systems are moving on, and that the market may be coming around to the view of EFI’s Gehman about their value: “I’ve told people for years that if I had a choice between buying a press and an MIS, I’d buy the management system first.”

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VISION IN PRINT: MIS BEST PRACTICE STUDY
Published in 2006, ViP’s MIS study surveyed the use of MIS by UK print firms to establish how these systems were being used, and what printers and MIS suppliers needed to do to enable printers to get more out of the systems.

One of the key findings of the report was that the way MIS are used today is to improve speed and efficiency in administration, and not as a tool to measure, control and develop the business. Of the firms surveyed, only 25% analysed the profitability of job types, customers and market sectors to establish the profit and loss generators.

Among the report’s recommendations was that printers should use the systems to produce concise reports on the state of the business, keep their fingers on the pulse, know where profits and losses were made, measure customer service levels and use overall equipment efficiency (OEE) and other KPIs to monitor production efficiency. To support that, it went on to suggest that MIS suppliers implemented the reporting of KPIs and summary data as standard parts of their system.

The report suggested that MIS should be used to optimise the day-to-day running and continuous improvement of the business. It highlighted that to understand the data, especially KPIs, showing how the figures were changing over time was more important than current values.

The report can be downloaded free from ViP’s website as a PDF. Go to www.visioninprint.co.uk