VLM

6.2 Benefits for VLM

• Decrease in processing time
  Due to the fact that the customer is building and proofing their own documents, VLM can process over one thousand online jobs a day. Each operator can therefore get through 120 jobs an hour. This is compared to the processing of offline documents, where the details are sent by email using a word file and separate images (Diagram 3.1). On average an operator will get through 25 jobs a day.
• Eliminates errors
  One of the huge benefits of this system is that VLM can’t make mistakes. The customer is responsible for designing, editing, proofing and ordering online. VLM have no involvement in this process, only to print the final version.
• Creates lock-in
  When a company uses VLM’s online ordering system, they need to have all their users trained on the system. Whilst initially this is very time consuming for VLM, once these users have been trained and the organisation has committed in the region of 60 branches, it creates a great deal of lock in. For them to move to another solution requires a fundamental business decision. VLM would have to be doing something drastically wrong in order for that to happen.
• Cost savings
  The cost of producing a brochure online compared to offline is substantially lower. The online environment leaves them better able to deal with the cyclical nature of the property market, such as at Christmas when relatively few houses are sold. VLM’s big cost in the traditional model is labour. They need a huge amount of labour at the busy periods to build these documents, but they also have to carry the cost of this labour during the slow times. In an online environment the percentage of labour dramatically reduces from 25% in a traditional environment to 7%.

7. Lessons learnt and advice for other companies

Initially when VLM started the development process for their online system, they were developing it for all type of print, lithographic and digital, rather than just concentrating on their core competence, which is digital printing. Declan’s advise is to focus, as opposed to trying to be all things to all men.

If they knew then what they know now, they would have built the solution on an SQL database, such as oracle. They did not however want to take the risk of making a large investment in an oracle database, in case the project wasn’t successful. So they decided to develop a smaller solution. Now they see the value of having it on a more robust platform and plan to migrate to such a platform by the end of the year.

Declan gives a stern warning not to underestimate the importance of user acceptance of a new system. This was a major difficulty for VLM. They also underestimated the amount of time it would take to train users on the system. As Declan said “you eventually get all the branches to come online but you don’t proceed as quickly as you would have initially anticipated”.