Case Study: Novaprint of Leicester

Peter Robinson, Steve Tilbury (pictured right) and Glynn Mansell are partners at Novaprint in Leicester. Their business is general litho print, producing “anything and everything”.

Their business has grown steadily over the years. However, they realised that estimating by hand was time consuming and it was easy, even for an experienced person, to miss costs off quotes. The situation was made more difficult as two of the partners did quotes, each using their own methods. This meant that quoting was inconsistent and it was difficult to deal with queries about each other’s quotes.

Job bags, also written by hand, were often difficult to read and lacked accurate detail. And finally, they found invoicing finished jobs was slow and laborious.

They drew the conclusion last year that they needed to streamline their estimating and production administration. With this in mind they set about looking for a suitable MIS at a reasonable cost.

Their aim was to make their way of working more consistent and open the opportunity to employ a full time estimator. They also recognised that there would be an opportunity to offload some of the work to other staff who did not have a background in print. All of this would also release them to develop other areas of their work.

Novaprint found that the packages they looked at previously were far too sophisticated for their needs. Steve Tilbury said, “They were full of features that we would never need and because of this they seemed very complicated for our type of work. But while we were looking around, we received an invitation to an Antares hands-on workshop, nearby at East Midlands Airport. So we went along…”

It was partner Peter Robinson who went to the workshop. Peter was able to explore Antares and get a real feel of how it would work for their business. Peter liked what he saw and after discussing it with his partners, they decided to take advantage of the Antares trial system that was on offer. This gave them a chance to find out for real whether Antares would be suitable for them. Literally, within days, they were using Antares to produce proper quotations for customers.

Steve said, “I was very sceptical at first that it would work. I had no computer experience, but I really was using Antares within a matter of a few days. You really won me over”.

Although they had up to two months to try the system, they knew within days that Antares was the system for them. They now have Antares working on four workstations within the company. Two are used for estimating and job bag production, one workstation is used for invoicing and general use and the fourth workstation is used in the artroom for finding information on jobs in hand.

Now they can quote and respond to customers quickly by fax or email. Quotes have a professional appearance and Antares now prints all job bags. Novaprint shop floor staff like the new job bags because they are detailed and legible. The job bags tell them what they need to know. Glynn, in the artroom, is very happy because information about all their work in progress is readily available.

Equally, Novaprint customers appreciate Antares, because their quotes are received quickly and professionally. All their quotes and jobs are numbered which makes life so much easier all round if there are queries.

Steve has this to say when summing up his experience of installing and using Antares: “My scepticism of computers was dispelled within a couple of days of installation and I can honestly say now that I’m won over. The speed we respond to enquiries is greatly improved and our quotes are much more accurate - especially towards the end of the day when I get tired! The whole process of quoting requires less ‘brainpower’ and Antares is excellent at spotting and preventing many simple mistakes. The quotes are all now well structured and because of this it’s much harder to miss costs off jobs”

As far as training and after-sales support is concerned, Steve said, “We’re really happy with the help we’ve received. In fact I’d say that we’re really impressed with that aspect of Antares.”

When asked to sum up, Steve was in no doubt: “Doing without Antares would be unthinkable.”