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Find out how Label Line streamlines communication, increases efficiency and gains visibility with printIQ
Label Line has been in business since 1999, servicing all of Australia and New Zealand. With 22 staff members, the company had a wide focus within the print industry, utilizing both conventional and digital print technologies. Within the last year, the company has reset and refocused on the area they are best at, label production.
Jason Brown, Managing Director, joined the Label Line family in 2023 and brought his experience in automating and digitizing workflows. Noticing a real need for updating their current systems of manual job folders within production and phone-based communication with customers, Jason began evaluating MIS solutions that could really change the way they work.
“We met with a few MIS providers to evaluate their solutions, but the interface and overall customer-centric approach from printIQ brought a lot of excitement. We could tell printIQ was starting to focus efforts on the label space and have continuously provided improvements throughout the last year,” Brown shared. “A lot of other MIS systems have focused on the manufacturing aspect, but printIQ has focused both on manufacturing and the customer experience. We knew we wanted to be on this journey with them!”
Label Line has found several benefits to implementing a modern MIS solution, but visibility and communication have become key.
Brown said, “We can now run reports in printIQ, comparing estimates to actuals to ensure our profit margins are being met and to identify problem areas we may need to adjust.”
Communication with clients has become much more streamlined. “Each quote is created and sent to the customer directly from the system. Once the quote is accepted, they are provided an order confirmation automatically. Through the portal, they can have live status updates and access invoices. This doesn’t just help our customers, it takes the back-and-forth effort and time with customer service, out of the equation,” exclaimed Brown.
Working in an older system that had not been maintained led to inconsistent data and reporting for Label Line. Brown shared that it had became a tool that could be used to generate a quote letter and that was it.
Label Line didn’t have a synchronized way of quoting. Brown stated, “Some were writing prices down with little retention while others were pricing jobs in an offline spreadsheet. They would have to raise the quote in the old system before sending it to a customer. It typically took someone with a lot of knowledge around our processes and materials to put together a quote.”
Everything was very manual for the Label Line team. Brown said, “We had rows of job bags in sequential number in the office. Customer Service would spend a lot of time finding the right job bag to double check the information and gather samples. Production was manually keeping track of jobs that were running in a spreadsheet, so the data wasn’t clear to be able to determine if we were making money on jobs and how much.”
PrintIQ provided a way for anyone within the Label Line organization to quote. Because all of their quoting and job tracking is now done in one system, data and analytics can be used for business decisions. There is no longer the need for highly-skilled staff, as quoting is simple and readily accessible.
Brown shared that he is pushing printIQ to the limits. “I come from the angle that anything can be done. If we are doing workarounds, we need to challenge them and find a way to automate. We kept throwing the printIQ team curveballs on how to remove workarounds throughout the implementation process. We know this is a journey, but they are constantly improving the system to solve these curveballs.”
Label Line has integrated their printIQ system with Xero for accounting, Windcave for payment gateways, and TIG as their freight aggregator. Brown shared that the TIG integration alone has removed hours of work from their team.
In a region where they still see increasing interest rates, demand overall is quite weak for the print industry. “Because we have changed the way we are going to market and have visibility to what’s working and not working within the business, we have been able to grow in a tough space,” shared Brown.
“We implemented printIQ in about 8 months and plan to roll out portals for each of our customers in the near future. We have a long-term goal to have 50% of our customer-base using the system. This brings greater efficiency to our processes, removing redundant tasks and possible errors from the equation.”
From an internal standpoint, the change to printIQ through the business became easy because of the clear communication within the team. “We kept our staff members updated through the entire process and asked for feedback along the way so there were no surprises. We wanted them to be able to adjust quickly and be fully aware of everything that was coming.”
“We can now run reports in printIQ, comparing estimates to actuals to ensure our profit margins are being met and to identify problem areas we may need to adjust,”
Jason Brown, Managing Director
Label Line Group