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Start to Finish - Forum?

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stephenvision

New Member
Hi there, i am wondering if there is anyone out there who has there own Forum board which is used as a business management system

this would start at Quotes and passed into graphics design and then onto porduction and finally invoicing, this would be a place for our staff to update information on jobs.

We have alot of jobs on going and in the process, hand written or verbal notes are being missed.
 
Pauly

Pauly

Printrade.com.au
you may want a CRM.
We've been using Star Infinity. But there's others like asana, trello, click up, monday.com and heaps more.

CRMs are a good way to start with some sort of management.

You probably would want to use something with a kanban board. different section of the board for different stages. it all depends how your workflow is.
We use a table layout as it works for us.
 
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stephenvision

New Member
Pauly said:
you may want a CRM.
We've been using Star Infinity. But there's others like asana, trello, click up, monday.com and heaps more.

CRMs are a good way to start with some sort of management.

You probably would want to use something with a kanban board. different section of the board for different stages. it all depends how your workflow is.
We use a table layout as it works for us.
Click to expand...
thanks pauly, we have looked at these types of management and they are just not what we are after.

i have seen a forum board used perfectly for the situation we are after, im just curious to see if others have tried/use this method
 
Pauly

Pauly

Printrade.com.au
Right Right.

I personally can't see a Forum Board helping in a way of a workflow.

The way we do it, is we have a spreadsheet/table of all our current jobs. and it acts like a progress board.
Each client/job has columns like "stock" "sizes" "notes" "proofing stage" "print stage" "finishing stage"
i have filters set up, so if you're the one doing proofing, you click the proofing filter and all the jobs that need proofing will show up.
Same goes with printing and finishing.

It's very easy to track jobs. Have the right people do the right jobs.

I've been around forums for many years, i dont know how you would use it to track jobs. seems clunky.


If you want some sort of forum, you probably could self host one on a dedicated network server.
or use a wordpress and host a forum like bbPress or something. You can host that locally too.
 
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stephenvision

New Member
it is mainly for covering our "paper trail" or conversations which are not documented.

i have seen a forum used exactly as i am invisioning, which starts at a quote which our evaluator inputs and starts the chain, this then goes to our graphics design team and one of them can acknowledge the job. the next reply to the thread would be for our designer asking for artwork files or fonts or material codes which our evaluator would respond to and so on, these are conversations which we are having verbally but there is no trail of exactly when this conversation happened and some of our jobs are ending up with missing information .

This also timestamps duration spent exactly on each portion of the job and can be a brief view of anyone to understand which process the job is at or who is responsible for the job being at a hault.
 
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stephenvision

New Member
i should reiterate, that this is not a way for tracking the jobs as such but mainly tacking the information on jobs and conversations.
 
Pauly

Pauly

Printrade.com.au
Yeah you can do this in almost any CRM with comments etc. We use comments to keep notes all the time on custom work. Comments work like normal text conversations. mobile notifications, email notifications.
 
Pauly

Pauly

Printrade.com.au
stephenvision said:
i am not looking for a CRM, im looking for other people who may have used a forum for this process.
Click to expand...
You can search the few business management/job management threads on here.

Most people would use something like a CRM. which literally outlines everything you want. without the forum bloat.
Some use dedicated software like shopvox or similar.
The bigger shops will have a CRM and or a MIS system for automation.

If you're so determined to use a Forum..
Get yourself a PC on a network.
Download XAMPP.
install Wordpress
download bbPress.
and off you go.
 
Gino

Gino

Premium Subscriber
It seems the OP does not want what is out already there, but wants to find someone who has already experimented with a forum kinda set up.

If you cannot keep track of what suzie said to tom, what makes you think they're gonna write it down ?? If you cannot rely on your people to be honest, you need more than a forum for your business. Keeping track in this way seems nice, but also most useless.
 
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stephenvision

New Member
Yes Gino, i wasnt so sure how to word that i was not looking for alternatives just a user who may have used this idea.

With there being no practice in place information is jittery, if there is an implementation of a community i feel people would abide easier as it prevents them for forgetting and allowing them to keep track of more jobs quicker.

like if my production staff dont know if a material is ordered they have to walk the length of building and wait if someone is in the restroom and so forth...
 
Pauly

Pauly

Printrade.com.au
Im curious on what apps you've tried and why they don't work for you?

Sometimes it takes trial and error to implement a system. we've tried a few, we change things up to improve workflow.
 
Gino

Gino

Premium Subscriber
Clearly a problem of the right hand not knowing what the left is doing. Is your building a football field long ?? For instance, just how many people work in your place ??
 
Notarealsignguy

Notarealsignguy

Arial - it's almost helvetica
Sounds like you first should looks at clearly defining the role and responsibilities of each position. It seems like all you are going to do is document the screw ups rather than actually fix anything. All this extra reporting serves no real purpose and is nothing more than a productivity killer.
Why can't the jobs just move in phases? It should never advance until all of the steps of a particular phase are completed i.e. it would never hit production without material being ordered.
 
Z

zspace

Premium Subscriber
We use Corebridge for shop management. It has a system for sending questions between departments and with customers. The records stay with the job. We supplement that with Teams for inter office communications on more general topics.
 
10sacer

10sacer

New Member
stephenvision said:
it is mainly for covering our "paper trail" or conversations which are not documented.

i have seen a forum used exactly as i am invisioning, which starts at a quote which our evaluator inputs and starts the chain, this then goes to our graphics design team and one of them can acknowledge the job. the next reply to the thread would be for our designer asking for artwork files or fonts or material codes which our evaluator would respond to and so on, these are conversations which we are having verbally but there is no trail of exactly when this conversation happened and some of our jobs are ending up with missing information .

This also timestamps duration spent exactly on each portion of the job and can be a brief view of anyone to understand which process the job is at or who is responsible for the job being at a hault.
Click to expand...
If you have seen something used that does exactly what you want - can you not track it down again and get the name or manufacturer?
 
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