HGI Co. — Completing a Triple Play
Interaction at that level is important because normally the same salesperson and CSR retain responsibility for a client's work, regardless of which plant does the production. While there are estimators in each facility, they have access to estimate all job components to whichever platform--web, sheetfed or digital--best fits the requirements.
"We don't want anyone telling a customer, 'I can't do that. We have to send it to the other plant,' " Faust explains.
Central to making this integrated production approach practical was implementing an EFI PSI print MIS solution throughout all three operations. Close to 500 jobs a month are being processed across the company, so there are a lot of small jobs in the mix.
HGI does global scheduling and has a master scheduler, points out Ed Miglio, vice president of manufacturing. "The schedule gets updated three times a day, and we have a production meeting across both plants (via teleconferencing) each morning," he says. "All of the department managers, production people and CSRs go over what's shipping in the next five days."
Jobs are tracked from estimating through to shipping in the PSI system, so CSRs can rely on it to keep tabs on work in progress, particularly when it is being produced by the other facility, Miglio notes.
Any functions that make logical sense to extend across the whole organization--including human resources, administration, IT, prepress, quality control, maintenance, shipping and receiving--have been set up as unified departments, Faust reports. Next up is moving to a single telephone system, so when people are paged, the request will be heard throughout all the facilities.
"It's a little thing, but it has a big impact from a culture standpoint in making this one entity," the company president contends. "When a customer walks into Hi-Liter, Inland or Plus Digital, we want the experience to be very similar."
