Mark O’Connell has been steadily building his business on the northern Beaches of Sydney for 21 years, working with a broad range of customers from surf clubs, local councils, and many local businesses. Mark and his seven staff provide a high-quality service, saving his customers from having to look outside of the Northern Beaches area.
The business has three complimentary divisions providing print, promotional products, and branded clothing.
The print business is the largest of the three divisions, offering a full design and print service from conception to completion. They provide digital sheet printing and large format printing in-house, other specialist print requirements such as offset print, screen print and flatbed print are reliably outsourced.
Mark has ensured he is able to cater to a wider range of his customers’ requirements by developing the promotional product and branded clothing divisions of the business. Through close partnerships with product suppliers, he ensures those needs are fully met with quality solutions and he captures great savings for his customers through offshore procurement where suitable.
After many years using a legacy print estimating software system that was solely focused on print estimating, Mark’s requirement was to improve processes and efficiencies so all elements of the business could be managed through one management solution. His requirements were solved by adopting the Hexicom solution, which although considered a Print Management software, has been specifically designed to handle the processes involved in the supply of a broad range of print, promotional products, and branded merchandise.
Mark needed his staff to have different levels of system access, excluding modules that do not directly relate to them, and for each individual to be able to view their own job queue. In addition to this, he also needed each person to be able to view the bigger picture of all the current live jobs in the business when they need to. For the finance and billing of customers Mark needed to have a system that linked through the internet via API with his Xero accounting software, as an approved Xero partner, Hexicom Software was able to offer this solution.
For the initial system configuration and training Mark worked with Christine Williams, Hexicom Software’s Training and Support Manager. She helped Mark to set up the system to work exactly as he needed, to meet his specific business requirements. Mark was then able to train his staff to use the elements of the system that applied to them. Christine provided training through prearranged, one-hour online training sessions, complimented by support articles from the Hexicom online knowledge base and adhoc Q&A sessions.
Mark says “Training and support has been great, whenever I send an enquiry the response is prompt and helpful, and Christine is great to work with”. As a former Microsoft trainer Christine has a broad range of system training skills and since joining Hexicom Software she has led the process of building a comprehensive online knowledge base of support articles and videos designed to enable customers to self-service support for common aspects of the system.
Having been using the Hexicom system for some months Mark has now added the B2B eStore Web to Print module and is creating his first online store for one of his regular customers to manage all their ordering for print, promotional products, and branded apparel. The customer runs many retirement villages over a wide geographic area, and by moving their ordering online, Mark will be able to provide a quality service and streamline his internal processes significantly. As more of his regular customers move to the Web2Print ordering model Mark expects to gain substantial internal workflow savings while improving his customer service.
