Shamrock Creative Finds New Accuracy with Virtual Ticket and Job Manager
In 1991, Cleveland's Shamrock Graphics purchased a small type composition company and renamed it Shamrock Creative. Their goal: to establish a creative/design company that could handle the workload generated by a major print and project management company like Shamrock Graphics. Eight years later, Shamrock Creative has grown to 14 employees producing over 1500 jobs per year doing film output, designing marketing campaigns, web sites, ads and videos, and much more. Shamrock Creative's total company sales approach $30 million annually.
Parent company Shamrock Graphics has also expanded, with sales offices in Ohio, Illinois, Tennessee, and New Hampshire. The company was recently named "Distributor of the Year" by Business Forms, Labels, and Systems magazine. The jobs generated by Shamrock Graphics are all produced by Shamrock Creative. Doing creative work for a large distributor, Shamrock Creative produces jobs for many companies, from telecommunications to internal marketing divisions. "We have no limitations to bind us," says Creative Director Dave Larson. "We can put your logo on a pen, or on a boat that we're selling you. We can give you film from an existing disk, or design an ad campaign from the ground up. We offer any services the customer wants."
Three years ago, Shamrock Creative designers and management were keeping track of their business on three-part paper forms. These forms were consolidated on a regular basis and stored in file cabinets, where employees would search manually when they needed to locate an archived file or job change order. The valuable time lost searching for old files and filling out forms for current jobs was too much for Shamrock Creative management; they purchased MetaCommunications' Job Manager in 1996 and Virtual Ticket when it was released in 1998. The change was felt immediately throughout the company.
"Job Manager and Virtual Ticket have helped us tremendously," says Larson. "We could track time and costs before, but never this completely. The information was never at our fingertips like this. A few mouse clicks does what an hour of sorting forms could do before."
According to Larson, Shamrock Creative's designers were less than enthusiastic about leaving their familiar paper forms for electronic job tracking. "They were just resistant to change, that's all. Job Manager has sped everything up. It allows less room for error, and we do less manual work. When the designers saw that they can record their work by simply clicking 'Start' and 'Stop', they gave up the paper forms entirely. They can't live without Job Manager now."
If the designers don't miss their paper job forms, certainly no one at Shamrock Creative misses the file cabinets full of archives. Virtual Ticket has made those cabinets obsolete by providing full archiving of all files, whether they're located on the network or in a CD library. Shamrock Creative's digital resources are now all searchable by resource, by job, by customer, by keyword, or by any other information recorded in the database. According to Larson, "This is an amazing feature when repeat jobs come in. If we need a graphic we used years before, we can find it even if we don't know what job it was used on, or even what the name of the file was. And we can find it quickly."
But archiving is only half of the story. "We have also recreated all of our company forms in Virtual Ticket. All of our fax sheets, customer support forms, job change forms — everything is immediately available and completely customizable. With Virtual Ticket, we're not forced to work in ways we're not used to."
If we need a graphic we used years before we can find it even if we don't know what job it was used on, or even what the name of the file was. And we can find it quickly.
Dave Larson, Creative Director
"Our biggest goal is offering a quality product," remarks Larson. "We make cutting edge technology available to our customers, giving them the benefit of all the resources at our disposal. Virtual Ticket and Job Manager help us achieve that. We give price quotes with every job we do, and it's important to stick to those as closely as possible. Job Manager tracks our costs so completely that we can give our customers notice well in advance if we think costs might go beyond the initial figures."
Managers like Larson use Job Manager nearly every hour of the day. Job Manager can instantly search through a database for any information needed, from a single invoice for an old job to every invoice completed within the last year. Total costs from a customer's invoices, total resources spent on any number of jobs, and employee time usage can all be tracked right from a manager's desk. Dave Larson believes that Virtual Ticket and Job Manager have made Shamrock Creative "very, very accurate."
Shamrock Creative is continuing their push to lead the industry technologically. From e-commerce and on-demand printing to printing directly to press from PDF, they know the best way to be successful is to provide the customer with the best product available. Shamrock Creative also knows that using MetaCommunications' Virtual Ticket and Job Manager has helped them achieve that success.
