National Print Group, Inc. Centralizes Data and Streamlines Workflows with EFI Pace

National Print Group, Inc. (NPG) is the premier provider of in-store and out-of-home signage. With headquarters in Chattanooga, TN since 1957, NPG operates state of the art manufacturing facilities and sales offices across the country. With 400 employees and more than 9 million sheets of litho printed in 2009, NPG is the one of the largest digital, screen, litho, out-of-home, and large format P-O-P printers in the world.

Challenge

Michael Miller joined National Print Group as Chief Information Officer with the mission of selecting and implementing a common MIS/ERP system to bring all locations under the same system. At the time, the Litho and Screen operations were running on EFI PSI and the two digital facilities were on home-grown systems. This inefficiency made it difficult to manage day-to-day operations, especially as the company grew.

"We had a hodge-podge of systems running our four facilities, and we needed to centralize data and workflows in order to bring efficiency to the operations," said Miller.

Solution

"NPG looked at seven MIS systems and selected EFI Pace. Pace was the only system that could handle the diverse needs of litho, screen and digital equally well," said Miller. The end-to-end, integrated management system is ideal for hybrid print environments, and integrates with their Kodak PRINERGY workflow and Metrix system.

NPG went live with the first digital plant in only six weeks—a record for Pace at the time. Three of their four facilities were live within six months. Today, the company has consolidated operations to three locations, all centrally managed via EFI Pace. Roughly 95 percent of employees use Pace daily for data collection, with 80-90 staffers in customer service, accounting and management using the system more heavily.

Results

"Pace enabled us to accomplish or two biggest IT goals—getting everyone on one system, and being able to understand profits across plants," said Miller. "It's also getting us closer to our third goal of improving efficiencies throughout the business."

Miller is thrilled that with EFI Pace he was able to quickly get all of their locations onto one system with one common language. As part of this, "data collection, especially labor and material tracking, is critical to us, and Pace makes it easy," he said.

The second most important objective was also achieved rapidly. "We're now able to track profitability at a customer level, with a single, unified view. Many customers use all three of our plants, and before it was difficult to track true costs."

Miller's team has successfully used the Pace APIs to build custom integrations to their Metrix workflow, though he plans to switch over to the Pace integration in the near future. Similarly, NPG has integrated its internally developed "Link" customer application (containing campaign management tools, fulfillment services, warehouse management tools, e-commerce and store profiling capabilities) with the Pace system, "bringing incredible synergies across all areas of the operation."

On the finance side, Pace's reporting capabilities have been beneficial. Explained Miller, "The ability to write custom reports is great—we're able to use the custom reports we've developed over time and have them hit the Pace database to ensure we have consistent, accurate data."

NPG is using Pace to streamline workflows and reduce errors—an ongoing process. "We're excited about the positive impact Pace has made to our business so far, and we're continuing to use it to improve efficiencies across the operation. We're confident Pace is the right tool to get us where we want to go," said Miller.

To further this process, NPG is continually evaluating JDF integrations and has recently installed the EFI PrintFlow dynamic scheduling solution in two plants to optimize the entire business operation. "It enables us to maximize capacity and efficiencies," said Miller.