How Clean Is Your Print Business Data?

Virtually every printer I meet with regarding their print software strategy mentions within the first five minutes their strong desire to easily get accurate data about their business. Some printers think this is only a software challenge: buy a reporting package, or better yet, invest in a business intelligence package. Some even think they need a database engineer on staff. Maybe even a full-time analyst who can simply respond to requests for business data on demand?

All these ideas are valid. All these ideas are for getting data and presenting it. The crux of the issue in most print businesses is that the underlying data is a mess. Clean, accurate data is not something you can buy from a vendor. It’s not even something you can pay a consultant to create for you. I wish there was an easy path to getting clean business data. Your business is creating data all day, every day, in all areas; data creation in a print business is done by everyone. However, just creating and acquiring data doesn’t automatically mean that it’s helpful. 

Here are some examples that might make you cringe:

The sales representative who fails to search to see if a prospect already exists and creates a duplicate. 

The purchasing agent who names the same vendor three different ways.

The accounting resource who puts ***DO NOT USE*** in certain data objects because they don’t know how to deactivate them or what the repercussions are of removing confusing objects from the data source.

The CSR who accidently changes costing on a printing press because he has more rights than he should within the Print MIS. 

The executive who insists that reports be in a certain format, so everything from the Print MIS is exported into Excel and then errors are introduced into the data in the editing process.

The pressman who sometimes starts the clock on a job at makeready, and at other times when the press is up and running (depending on his mood).

Data is hard to keep clean and accurate. It isn’t a project with a start and a finish. It isn’t a project you can give to your smartest employee to take care of. All your employees are in the business of generating data. Employees are first and foremost trying to get their jobs done, gets orders out for customers, keep presses running. They often don’t have the context of how their decisions impact the data that ends up in reports, on P&Ls, and in audits.

Data gets messy because people make data compromising decisions daily; then, before you know it, there is a lot of junk in your data. The goal is not perfection here; you don’t want to get too agro about data but the goal is to put some checks and balances on the “state of your data” before it gets too bad. 

One of the reasons a Print MIS implementation is so painful is that it forces you to look at your messy data. Each data object (e.g. Customers, Prospects, Hourly Rates, Estimating Standards, etc.) could be a project all on its own. It can be overwhelming and often what happens is you defer data cleansing because you just have to get the Print MIS implemented. Then data cleansing gets pushed down into a black hole where nobody owns it and nobody is focused on it. We don’t really connect the frustration of “lack of accurate reporting” to our messy data. 

I’ve talked a lot about data-driven print businesses. When you have accurate data that is accessible, you have a clear differentiation. Printers with messy data might still get useful information, but it takes a lot of work to get at it. I have seen the most amazing Excel magicians who reverse the old adage “garbage in, garbage out.” This comes at a cost because if you have to work that hard to get to the data so you can make data-driven decisions, then you are slower, less responsive, and more expensive than your competitor who has put systems in place to keep data integrity up.

We have been helping some labels and packaging customers implement online ordering for their customers. The fascinating outcome is that this project has forced these customers to not only clean up their data in their Print MIS but also adjust the way they are using their Print MIS. One of my biggest pet peeves about data is the decision to repurpose one field in a software application for another use. People do it all the time. “There was no field for this, so we just used that field. Don’t worry, we used the language editor to change the field name in the interface.” YIKES! Do you know what the original purpose was for that field? What if you need to solve that purpose one day? Do you know the vendor’s plan for that field/logic driven off that field is in the future? This is very dangerous behavior because it sets you up to have unexpected outcomes. 

The other thing that completely derails data integrity is putting valuable information into Notes fields. Again, remember that your employees are just trying to get things done. So they think to themselves, “I just need to communicate this with production. What’s the difference if I fill out these drop-down fields or put the information in a sentence in the Notes field?” People make this decision every day. They are not malicious, they are not stupid, they just don’t have context and understanding how everything in the Notes field is not accessible to reports.

Data integrity and clean data definitely fall into the “couldn’t be more boring” to talk about, strategize about, or implement category, but it might be one of the most important elements to competing in this data-driven world. Is this market segment making or losing us money? Do we need another resource in estimating? Is it time to add another shift in digital? These are the decisions you are faced with all the time and your data should give you really good guidance to finding the right answer, and the right investment at the right time. Please don’t tell me you use your intuition; accurate, trusted data should be driving your business decisions. Find article here PrintingNews.com/00000000 ■