Do you have an overview of the status of all jobs in your company? Or do you know what data is present in your company? The main reason you know is that you can make good business decisions based on your company's data. However, you need to be able to put it all together in a simple overview like a production dashboard. Our CTO David van Driessche, gives you some friendly advice in this video.

"There are some standard questions that we ask at the beginning of each visit or project.

How many jobs do you get a day, on average? How many of those jobs are good, how many are bad. How many reprints do you have? What’s the margin you get on different products? And are these trends going up or down?

In many cases only partial answers are available. While the feedback is that it would be good to understand more about these questions. And strangely enough, it usually isn’t that difficult to get the information. You have a whole range of systems in your company and they know about these things.

If you have a web-to-print system or an MIS, those know about quantities of orders. A prepress system knows which jobs were good and which were bad and what was bad about them. Your accounting system or again the MIS knows what margins are on products.

The challenge is to bring all that data together in a concerted way. Data gathering should be as automatic as you can make it. People shouldn’t have to do effort to get things together. In order for data to be useful, it has to be always there, it has to be always correct and it has to be filtered down so that you only see those pieces of information that are going to make a difference to your business.

There is a fancy term for this, it’s called business intelligence. The art of extracting information so that you can make intelligent decisions about your business. Good information is the difference between doing what you’ve always done and seeing exactly where problems occur and where you might have opportunities.

Business intelligence is a fancy term, but is one you do good at looking at!"