Quality Control Throughout Your Workflows

Job Management or Tracking Workflow

When does a job become a job in your organization? When the client accepts the proposal? When someone hands you an assignment? Do you have any mechanisms to facilitate the transaction, such as a job ticket or work order? Depending on the size of your organization, maybe all this occurs verbally, on paper, or via email. But if you are part of a larger organization with a well-defined staff and budget, you might benefit from a job management application. The many items you might have to track include

• Resources, such as staff, art, and photography

• Timelines and deadlines

• Budgets

• Digital assets

• Vendors

Perhaps jobs or projects are assigned within the context of a team of supporting cast, a blended group of internal staff and external vendors. Monitoring the progress of the project and knowing whether you are on time and on budget could mean spending a lot time tracking down answers to questions, or it could simply involve the click of a few keystrokes to manage and monitor your projects straight from your desktop, or anywhere. Where is the project physically? Who is working on it? What stage is it in? How much time and money do you have left?

Consider software in the following categories: job tracking, job management, project management, and time billing. There is some overlap in these categories, so I've chosen to mention them all. Several good products are on the market designed specifically for the graphic arts/marketing/communications industry.

Time billing applications can offer the simple tracking of time and resources by an individual. Project management can manage a project with multiple contributors over time, whereas job tracking can capture time and resources attributed to any or many jobs in progress at any time. Job management can monitor the progress of a project and let you know, at any given time, what stage it is in and who is working on it.

Once again, assess where you are currently with respect to job management. Is your current system effective? Can you get answers to questions quickly, or do you spend a lot of time tracking job-related information? Can you know, at any given moment, if your jobs are on time and on budget? Would there be value in increasing the efficiency of your department with job management?

This class of applications inserts a dimension of accountability that you might not currently have within your job function or workgroup. For the individual, tracking your time and resources associated with a job will help you bill consistently and more accurately estimate future projects. For the workgroup or team, job tracking and project management forces groups to clearly define their roles and responsibilities as well as their deadlines. Job management allows a workgroup to be easily monitored, in many cases from anywhere.

So, whether you are looking for a standalone application for an individual job function, a client/server application for a workgroup, or remote access for management monitoring from anywhere, there are plenty of features to choose from, including

• Job tracking

• Job cost

• Accounting

• Remote or web access

• Estimating/Planning

• Order entry

• Invoicing

• Asset management

• Customer history

• Job history

• PO management

• Scheduling

• Shipping

• Inventory

• Finished goods inventory

This category of workflow offers accountability for staff, resources, projects, timelines, and budgets. With a well-chosen product and a solid implementation, it can quickly pay for itself. How? It can pay for itself in lost time found, a more efficient use of resources and staff, and quicker and better decision-making with accurate information delivered in a timely manner.