It is so tempting. You have an API or other tool at your disposal that lets you get data in to or out of your Print MIS system. You have a couple of your key online ordering systems already integrated. Off to the side is your rarely used niche online ordering tool for a particular area of your business. It's not integrated, and you decide it's time to proceed. You tell your technical team to undertake the project and you give them a bucket of time and/or money to get the project done. They tell you they need a 3-6 month window of time to complete and off they go. This might have been a big mistake if you have been ignoring manual touchpoints in your plant operations.

Don't get us wrong. We are big fans of integration and automation in our practice. It is a large part of what we do. However, we want companies to make strategic integration and automation decisions that are prioritized to get the highest return. What we often encounter is companies that are completely missing opportunities to remove repetitive touchpoints. Each individual touchpoint might not cost your company a lot of money in isolation, but when it is highly transactional and repetitive, those costs quickly add up. In addition, any time there is a manual touchpoint that is repetitive, there is potential for error. When something gets missed or is done incorrectly, the rework costs quickly overtake any profit on that order. Humans get distracted and can either forget to do a task or make a mistake while doing it. PrintMIS systems are excellent at completing repetitive tasks quickly and correctly. Most vendors have modules that let you automate touchpoints in a relatively simplistic way. Quite simply it becomes "if this happens in the database, then do this". The "then do this" part gets done by the system instead of a human. That saves you money, and adds profit. 

While integrating the system that yields 15 orders a month is a very fun and technical project, it is also most likely an expensive and long one. 15 orders is a relatively low volume and while it's a pain the customer service team manually has to enter those, that may be the right decision for now.  If over in operations you have highly repetitive touchpoint tasks happening, don't ignore them. It is most likely a more lucrative and a faster return to tackle those ahead of the niche system integration. Here are some examples of common human touchpoints that could be automated:

• the prepress department emailing the press department every time a file is ready to be produced
• walking around the plant to update a spreadsheet of where jobs are currently at
• the shipping department manually entering tracking numbers in to the Print MIS every time an order gets sent out
• the customer service team emailing tracking numbers to customers every time an order ships
• manually emailing a customer when their invoice has gone past due

Those are just a small handful of relatively simple touchpoints that could be automated with the various workflow tools the PrintMIS systems have. Most of these examples would amount to hundreds of transactions a week so when you automate one touchpoint, you reduce a lot of collective costs. It doesn't take long before your profit per order percentage goes up. 

By all means keep the big projects on  your radar, and execute when they make sense for your company. Just don't ignore low hanging fruit of manual touchpoint reductions.