AUTOMATION and WORKFLOW

[mbasch]

HO-LEE-SHIT, you a programer or a sign maker? lol that uh.... that sounds like a LOT. I have so many questions, but I guess the main one is: who did all that ☝️ for you?

Ha! I have been working with filemaker my entire career and love the techy stuff. I actually did print automation for the first 10 years of my career. It has been a work in progress for 20 years. It is an easy program to build simple databases since it is visual but the heavy lifting of tying it into QB and FEDEX/UPS was out sourced to the folks who provide the plugins. I am thinking if I ever retire, I'll develop it as a passion project to share.

 

[Christian @ Visual Graphx]

Ok so, let me ask you this: the majority of orders that get initiated in your shop: where's that happening? website, or something else? you mentioned the website is automated, any manual process to onboard new jobs?

Both from our website and "offline" by my sales team. We built an admin-only side to our site that allows us to create custom products, which our team configures to prevent client errors.

 

[ADVANCED DISPLAY]

Both from our website and "offline" by my sales team. We built an admin-only side to our site that allows us to create custom products, which our team configures to prevent client errors.

So, when one of your employees gets a call/email/walk in lead or actual order: they have a new order form of some kind they fill out and it specifies the pertinent info and status and it's in the system to be moved as it gets done? That right?

I spent the last two days in tandem with ChatGPT coming up with a Google form that either one of my employees, or the customer even could fill out, it automatically enters into a ledger, so I have a record of everything and then creates a card in Trello that I can see in the Job board without having to touch anything… I'm still fine-tuning the form to make it complete, as well as hammering out the bugs in the line-item info with the card in trello. I'm not spending TOO much time on it as I have way too much going on but, I do have concerns about making the staff do initial contact/order initiation this way. But if they end up slipping back into old habits at LEAST I'm not. out-of-pocket as the tools are free. Thanks for the ideas guys.

 

[Pauly]

So, when one of your employees gets a call/email/walk in lead or actual order: they have a new order form of some kind they fill out and it specifies the pertinent info and status and it's in the system to be moved as it gets done? That right?

I spent the last two days in tandem with ChatGPT coming up with a Google form that either one of my employees, or the customer even could fill out, it automatically enters into a ledger, so I have a record of everything and then creates a card in Trello that I can see in the Job board without having to touch anything… I'm still fine-tuning the form to make it complete, as well as hammering out the bugs in the line-item info with the card in trello. I'm not spending TOO much time on it as I have way too much going on but, I do have concerns about making the staff do initial contact/order initiation this way. But if they end up slipping back into old habits at LEAST I'm not. out-of-pocket as the tools are free. Thanks for the ideas guys.

This is where a MIS system works well. saves you reinventing the wheel. Build your workflow and your users simply input the data. if there's a customer portal, they can make their orders.
That's how it works for us with PrintIQ.