MyOrderDesk by PagePath

When Jim Collins makes a plan for the new year, before designating new projects, he identifies three things he wants to stop doing.

Collins, author of Good to Great, says having a not-to-do list is as important for achieving your goals as a to-do list.

First, the to-dos as recommended by Gary Bencivenga, author of Success Bullets.

• Apply the famous 80/20 rule to your work. About 20 percent of your activities are responsible for 80 percent of your success. Give those activities a high priority. Review your to-do list every day.
• Rise an hour earlier and give your highest-payoff activities your attention. Earl Nightingale claimed that if you spend this hour in study of your field, you will be an expert in five years.
• Slow down. Everything is not urgent or important. Define matters that will improve your work and life. Do those things well, though you sometimes have to ignore other things.

Your not-to-do list

1. Don’t answer email in the morning. Let phone calls coming from people you don’t recognize go to voice mail.
2. Don’t overcommunicate with low-profit, high-maintenance customers. Discover which customers are responsible for your profits and which just take up your time.
3. Don’t carry your to-do-list in your head. It will perpetually nag you so you won’t be able to think as well on priority work.
4. Don’t multitask. Doing two things at once brings a poor result for both.
5. Never agree to go to a meeting that has no clear agenda, recommends Tim Harris, author of The 4-Hour Work Week.

PagePath Technologies recently conducted an online survey of Print MIS Systems. What you are going to see below is strictly raw data from the survey. We have not tried to sway in any direction or draw any conclusions from this. We are just presenting data. We would encourage you to comment below on any of your thoughts or feelings on this matter. We hope this helps.

Data from the question “What MIS/Estimating System are you currently using?”

Data from the question “How would you rate your MIS/Estimating System”

Comments on the various MIS Systems

PrintSmith

• We have used PrintSmith for 5 years. It is improving slowly. Some of the new features in 8 are worthwhile.
• The product works fine, but I have not seen any signs of progress or development for at least two years.
• Good, reliable program but lacks good support. The program handles all our needs and I pay yearly maint. fee but when I needed help the support staff seemed aloof. I get better support from others that use PrintSmith
• PrintSmith is a very good estimating program but for upgrades I think it’s beyond their current programmers and support staff.
• The base module “PrintSmith” is limiting. We are debating whether to buy the module Report Writer.
• Overall it meets our needs. Would actually prefer a little bit more complex estimating system. That part is a little to generic and set up for a variety of users.
• Reports are very difficult as are many of the pricing features — also not compatible with any bookkeeping system
• Have been using PrintSmith for many years; last year tried to switch to ePace but it was very difficult.Very easy to use but has limitations (mainly no integration with any other program)

PrintersPlan

• Powerful, flexible, fast.
• We’ve been using it for over 20 years. They have the best service. They also have a user group and they listen to what we ask for…big plus.
• Great program. Wonderful support
• I was at a shop which used Printers Plan for eight years and Printers Plan seemed more user friendly.

Franklins

• Does an adequate job but the SQL server seems to slow everything down. Have to wait awhile for Estimate/Job Ticket retrieval and export of estimates to .pdf’s.
• I’d really like to switch to something more user friendly.

Others

• Custom coded program that runs all functions of our company. Estimating, scheduling, paper, inventory, invoicing. Has been put together over the last 30 years, and still going. Yes that is right 30 years. The first parts of it were coded in 1978, and work just fine.
• Our ERP is from Reflex Software. It is mostly custom developed but financial system is based on their common ERP core that they use for multiple implementations. We have worked with the same software developers for 20 years. Our previous ERP was a Unix green screen terminal application. Expensive to do custom development. And sometimes it sucks to sometimes be basically beta testing new features in a production environment but it’s very targeted to our needs.

Additional thoughts or comments are encouraged below. Thanks to all who participated.