Many Locations? You Need One Quality Standard for Print
Chances are good that your enterprise operates in more than one location. If you are in manufacturing, you may have several production facilities, warehousing and administrative offices. Perhaps you are a retail chain or an automobile dealer with multiple outlets placed conveniently for your customers. Or you might be in a service industry such as banking or insurance that does business through branch offices located in different cities, states, even regions.
With employees spread across a wide geographic footprint, you face challenges with printed materials that owners and managers with a single location don’t have to address. Naturally, your company has an image that you want to protect, no matter where you come in contact with your customers. That means that promotional materials, customer-facing forms, and other printed pieces must convey the same message and with the same quality.
So how, exactly, do you allow for those locations to “customize” those items with names and addresses appropriate for the individual branch or franchise, but ensure that they comply with quality standards you set? How can you be sure that different people in different offices with various levels of experience in getting materials produced will all make the right choices?
Doing It The Wrong Way
It’s a common problem. Some companies try to address it with centralized printing and purchasing functions. This often leaves branch offices short of forms when a home-office re-order process takes too long. It can also lead to incomplete or incorrect information as people far from the “field” fail to notice mistakes or omissions that personnel in the affected office would have caught.
Other companies place things in the hand of the individual office. That, too, can cause issues. People not familiar with ensuring printing quality or who don’t understand the importance of adhering to corporate identity standards can take liberties with your design standards and create materials that don’t reinforce your corporate brand in the fashion you’d prefer.
A Better Approach To Print Supply Chain Management
This is one case where you can have “the best of both worlds.” With technologies from Superior Business Solutions, you can have a strong, consistent image that projects your brand in the best possible way no matter what office the printed materials come from. Yet those materials can carry the individualized information tailored to each office that carries a localized feel that will resonate with customers of that brand office.
Corporate Kiosk allows you to create basic standardized materials, from brochures and flyers to business forms, and permit specific areas of customization to be used by individual offices when ordering or reordering those pieces. The professional look is assured, and the personal touch is built into the system.
Corporate Kiosk also means more efficiency for your organization. Important content decisions are made once and “locked in” – no time is wasted by people in outlying offices reinventing the proverbial wheel. They are freed up, instead, to do the things you hired them to do. And they can reorder forms whenever they need them by simply using the system and adding or editing information in the areas to which they have access.
Better For Promotional Products, Too
The same advantages apply to promotional product procurement. You can make the smart, creative and appropriate choices for your company’s needs, then make those choices available when employees in other offices need them. The “automated” consistency protects you against odd or inappropriate decisions, widespread price variances for similar items, and staff time wasted “re-shopping” for the same items.
Naturally every situation is different, but if you operate from more than one location, there are some very tangible benefits to your print supply chain and promotional product management that can be gained from the technologies offered by Superior Business Solutions.
I would love the chance to give you some examples of how businesses like yours have taken advantage of Corporate Kiosk, and are now big believers. If you have a few minutes, get in touch with me or contact one of our sales reps. Together we’ll determine what it could mean for your business.
