Topcolor numéric
Competitive advantage through revenue-generating business processes
Sometimes you simply are the first and the largest. The French business Topcolor was one of the first digital printing businesses in France and is also one of the largest with its 32 employees. An excellent achievement for a business that was still a mere ‘photo lab’ only 35 years ago. The family business regularly invested in ‘the best and the largest’ and can, therefore, boast of having the very latest machinery. However, as is often the case, the administrative business processes were treated as the runt of the litter during the years of growth. Topcolor, like many other businesses, thought that administration was too expensive and would yield no profits...
Flexibility, but at what price?
Topcolor is best known for its seemingly infinite flexibility at production level. The Colmar business supplies, among other things, stickers, banners, POS material for retail and display windows, printed PVC, Dibond, and plexiglass, as well as car wrapping, general layout, and installation. A sizeable sandwich. Getting all this done on time requires an extensive and extremely flexible schedule, day after day. Topcolor needs two to three persons for this. Unfortunately, they had no insight into the delivery schedule...
The 3,000 or so quotations per year were calculated in Excel and transferred manually into its self-designed software. This software then generated all the other documents such as order forms, work orders, and invoices. Planning was done via Google and purchases via e-mail or telephone.
This system worked perfectly for Topcolor for a long time but proved to be very time-consuming. Moreover, uniformity is a requirement to remain competitive in a strongly fluctuating market. It helps to avoid mistakes and also saves a lot of time.
Overview via a real dashboard
So, what is required to achieve efficient administrative workflows to be able to reduce man-hours and earn more money?
- Centralised information that can be accessed and viewed from anywhere in ‘real-time’
- Better general organisation
- A transparent overview and visualisation of the business, in other words, a ‘dashboard’
- Fully integrated and automated business processes
MultiPress has a dashboard module which is like a compass pointing effortlessly to the extremes in the administrative and production processes. It means that every employee can switch with direction based on real-time information. Thanks to the web-based dashboards - visualised in a highly graphical interface - everyone at Topcolor can now use information that adds value to the job profile.
Future Plans
The upcoming online plans have already been included in the necessary provisions made via MultiPress. This is because the business software connects effortlessly to a web shop and related products via API.
MultiPress can also feed any workflow system (JDF) and get full feedback from most workflow systems (JMF), making time and material registration much smoother. It helps to avoid duplication of work and reduces the error rate. It makes not only production but also shipment planning much more efficient. Costs are now being saved in these areas too, both in terms of transport and logistics.
In short, reducing the error rate and avoiding duplication of work yield a significant return. The French business is also quite happy about the fact that Topcolor has become more competitive thanks to MultiPress!
