Introduction
Printing Management system is designed to facilitate user to feed customer's information, create quotation and jobs and track every process involved imprinting till delivery.
The system helps streamline the tracking of the stages involved in printing and allows user to generate attractive pages and dashboards on the basis of data available in the reports.
Problem Statement
While recording data has always been tough through conventional methods like excel sheets, word documents etc, it also does not provide a way to manage that data and retrieval is very tough. The interface is not very easy to understand for users who aren't much aware of the technologies and data is also at high risk of being released to unauthorized sources. Following are some of the major problems our client faced:
- Cluttered or confusing user interface.
- Redundancy of information.
- Hard to pull analytics report.
- Hard to pull weekly/monthly/annual reports.
- Unable to track progress on each job process.
- Not very convenient way of storing Employee's information.
- Lot of manual work on calculations.
- Inability to store customer information properly.
- No proper format to generate quotations for customers.
- Inability to send notification to customer about the work progress.
- Improper task assignment to employees.
- Lack of standard process flow.
- High Manual dependencies due to improper information passing.
- Inability to keep stock information.
- Inability to track wastage in each stage of job.
Solution Implemented
This system is developed completely in Zoho Creator to overcome the above mentioned issues. It includes a very clean, easy to use interface which is much self instructing and serve as a complete system in itself as demanded by the client. Following are some main features of the application:
Dashboard
It provides the number of jobs entered so far, number jobs in each stage and pending tasks in each stage of the job.
Customer Inquiry
A simple form allowing to enter customer detail which will then be used in further more forms.
Quotation
Enables customer to generate a quotation by filling in the details of customer requirement. The form fetches information about the customer by it's name and does calculation on the basis of total quantity and unit price or charges inclusive of GST amount.
Quotation Page
A report for each form is generated which act as database to the system. The Quotation report contains button that facilitates quotation page generation that can be printed or saved as pdf.
Job Card
Job card is a detailed form which enables the user to enter all the important information about any job which is confirmed. It allows user to fetch information either from the quotation or from the customer details itself.
Email Notification and Job Card Page
A job card on submission sends an email notification to the customer that the job card has been created and their job has been passed to designer to process. Also,the job card report allows creation of job card page which can be printed or saved as pdf for reference.
Designing
This is a report which allows a user to view certain information that is brought from the Job card on submission. The Designer chooses his name and by the use of a button named "Move to CTP" it moves the job to next stage.
CTP
This report gets it's information from job card and designing. A user feeds in some extra details about plates and wastage etc and moves the job to next department through a button named "Move to Press".
Press
This is again a report that works similar to designing and CTP. When a Press Room person completes his job,he moves the job out to deliver through the button"Move to Delivery".
Delivery
The delivery tab allows the delivery of item completely or partially. Once a delivery package is made ready, a Delivery Challan is generated through a button which can be sticked on the package. Delivery can be splitted further for partial delivery.
Employee
The allows the user to keep all the employee information which is used in Job Card, Designing, CTP and Press where user selects their name in the record.
Inventory
A very small and basic inventory system is implemented to keep record of Purchase Orders and Requisition Orders. The Module can be expanded further into a complete Inventory System as well.
Automation
Each form shows different level of automation in the application.
- Customer information is fetched automatically in Quotation and job card on the basis of customer name.
- Amount calculation is done automatically when certain quantity and unit price is entered in the quotation and job card form.
- Automatic email notification goes to the customer when job card is created and when their package is ready for delivery.
- No previous information has to be refilled when a job is moved to next department for processing.
Future Scope
The application is highly flexible for future add ons and has a greater scope of expansion as the business expands.
- The application is easy to mould and can have fully functional Accounting system inside it.
- It could also have a more defined Inventory system developed inside it to keep better information of incoming and outgoing stock.
- As Zoho creator allows flexibility to be integrated with other zoho products, it can further be integrated with Zoho Books, Zoho Expenses, Zoho CRM, Zoho People etc to provide wide variety of solution that can be maintain in each individual product in synchronization with each other.
- It can also be made available to customer to drop orders online and manage customer enquiries as well.
- SMS can be integrated to send notification to the customer on completion of every job.
- The application can further be expanded to allow Customer to track progress of their orders