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Document Management
Our Customer's Point of View
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Written by Mike Gilleland
President of Progeny Press |
Progeny Press publishes study guides for literature for the home
school and private school markets. We put together workbooks that
are essentially series of essay questions for students studying
great literature—in other words, we give teachers the questions to
ask and the topics to discuss. We cover grades kindergarten through
12th grade and all kinds of books, from Frog and Toad Together, to
the Little House books, to Shakespeare and The Lord of the Rings—79
titles in all. We sell our study guides throughout the United States
and overseas via our
website, direct mail, and through dozens of independent bookstores
and catalog companies.
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When Mr. Shuler stopped by in 2000, we had
already heard the promise of on-demand printing from
others—short runs at low cost—but somehow it had never
materialized. But the people at DigiCOPY asked questions,
listened to the answers, and took some examples of our product
so they could run experiments. And when they came back, the
experiments looked better than our current product, their
solutions showed they had actually understood our problems and
procedures and were willing to work hard to give us what we
wanted, and it looked like they really could give us short print
runs at low cost.
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| We tried a few study guides with DigiCOPY in Eau Claire, and
after seeing the results we quickly switched our full product
line into their hands.
DigiCOPY has allowed us to be more flexible than we imagined possible. (Of
course, this means the people at DigiCOPY Eau Claire have been even more
flexible!) We used to send a product to print and wait two to four weeks
before we could ship it. We now get our study guides back in one to three
days. In one amazing instance, we e-mailed a file to DigiCOPY well after
midnight and received shrinkwrapped study guides by midmorning!
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| For the most part now, however, we have settled into a productive routine.
Once or twice a year we send over a CD-ROM containing updated .pdf files of
our titles. Throughout the rest of the year we simply order our study guides
in quantities of 50 to 150, and DigiCOPY prints them, assembles them, and
delivers them to us within a day or two. We keep a steady stream of orders
going to DigiCOPY—we never have to worry about being out of inventory for
more than a couple of days (which has made our distributors very happy), and
our printing costs are now
closely tied to the numbers of product we sell and when we sell them, not to
the quantities we think we might sell or to the quantity we need to get an
affordable per piece price. |
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