Springfield Solutions improves customer service and enjoys efficiency gains with Esko WebCenter

Country
UK

Solution
Packaging Management Solution

Product
WebCenter

The customer

Springfield Solutions, Hull, UK

Across more than 45 years, Springfield Solutions has evolved from its beginnings as a proofing house to become a leading name in reprographics, brand management and printing. The company now delivers digitally printed self-adhesive labels, artworking, reprographics services and packaging mock-ups to help its customers reach their target audience with innovative labels and packaging that really stands out on shelf, on-line and at home.

With customers around the globe, Springfield Solutions operates across most market sectors, including automotive, beauty and cosmetics, chemical and cleaning, food and drink, health and wellbeing, paints and coatings.

As part of its continued commitment to remaining at the leading edge of using technology to drive productivity and efficiency, Springfield Solutions was looking to introduce a new packaging management solution across the business.

The challenge

Meeting demand for shorter runs with reduced lead times

“Like most businesses, over the years we’ve seen the time to get a job in, completed and back out getting increasingly short,” said Neil Percy, Repro Production Manager at Springfield Solutions. “As well as reduced lead times, we’re dealing with demand for shorter runs on a daily basis. With lead times becoming more compressed than ever, we knew we had to invest in technology to help our experienced team manage the process, not just in production but also in terms of customer service.”

Having worked in the industry for 25 years and as a user of Automation Engine for more than a decade, Neil said he was very familiar with the quality and reliability of Esko technology. “We conducted a full exercise throughout 2019, where we looked at around 20 potential packaging management solution systems,” said Neil. “The final decision was a really simple one. For us, WebCenter was just clearly far better than any of the alternatives we considered.

“I’d seen WebCenter in action before and having seen the new features of the newest version, I knew it was a phenomenal piece of kit,” said Neil. “As well as being brilliantly powerful, the new functionality means that it’s a tool we could use to build our entire customer service system. It’s all about connectivity - it integrates perfectly with Automation Engine which automates our workflow, and the two will essentially now talk to each other.”

The solution

A complete packaging management solution

Following this lengthy period of research, Springfield Solutions commissioned Esko to supply its WebCenter solution. The powerful, secure, web-based packaging management and collaboration platform manages all aspects of preproduction specification, approval and project lifecycle to remove the bottlenecks that are most commonly associated with the packaging design to production process.

“Although there are turnkey versions available, we opted specifically for a fully bespoke system,” explained Neil. “We’ve now got everything installed and prepared all of our systems, and the team enjoyed comprehensive training at the back end of 2019. We had actually planned to build early in 2020, but we had a large new customer and we didn’t want to interrupt the flow of work at that point. Then of course, the COVID-19 pandemic hit and we opted to delay a little longer,” he said.

Neil said that the Springfield Solutions team had built its system around WebCenter from May through until July 2020, with a go-live date scheduled soon. “We’re so excited that it is now installed and ready to use,” he said. “The user dashboard is just like one huge resource of information. Every single job in the company can be visible and searched, as well as the individual orders. Compared to the previous system it is chalk and cheese!”

The benefits

Speed, accuracy, efficiency, productivity

Neil explained that with WebCenter, the lifecycle of a job is visible and accessible to any member of the Springfield Solutions team. “We can identify where any job is at any time and give everyone involved in the job – including the customer – real-time updates,” said Neil. “Moreover, the approval system actually brings the customer inside our business, which is a massive plus point for us. Instead of emailing our customers PDFs to proof or review, with WebCenter they can just come into the system and approve or comment on their jobs directly. Once we start using this for the digital side of the business too, we’ll also be able to start inviting customers to upload their jobs for queues. It really will help us foster the spirit of partnership and collaboration that we value.”

Neil said that while the introduction of WebCenter will drive efficiency for the production team, he was particularly excited about the benefits the system would deliver to the customer service team. “With our old system, we’re currently duplicating information across customer services, with data being manually input at various points,” he explained. “But with WebCenter, the information only ever needs to be entered once, then it is accessible across the business. Obviously this helps reduce any errors by removing the constant re-entering of data, and importantly eradicating data inputting time, which then frees up the customer service team to focus on actually dealing with the customer element of their job.”

Neil said he was particularly impressed with the speed at which WebCenter updates information across the entire system. “Like many in our industry we have a ‘legend’ on our jobs and until now we have been using a system where the legend communicates changes to a database that updates every 15 minutes. With WebCenter, the update is instantaneous.

“We are going to experience an increase in speed, as well as being able to access and share much more detailed and reliable information,” said Neil. “As the system narrows down production times, we’re looking forward to overall efficiency gains, as well as an increase in productivity in customer services which will be great for boosting our customer loyalty.”