Dave Thornton
Member
I'm on the hunt for a web portal solution for our customers to use, and have looked at a lot of different offerings and still am having a tough time finding a good fit. I'm the IT guy for a small label printing operation that specializes in expanded content labels, and we're getting requests from customers to be able to view some pertinent info and submit order information online, and submit new art files when necessary.
From checking with our internal users, what I've determined we as a group wants is something that will allow customers (and internal users) to log in, see a list of items they have previously approved and ordered, along with pertinent info on each of those items (part number, past PO numbers & job numbers, thumbnail image, link to approved pdf, etc...). Being able to submit info to initiate a reorder of that item if they so choose is also important, as is being able to initiate a new item by submitting order information and art files. The solutions I've seen offered by vendors that cater to our industry (Esko's Web Center, Hybrid Software's GoPrint/GoProof) do more than what we're looking for -- our internal users don't necessarily need or want the online proofing bit. Our current approval system is somewhat flexible and allows our customers to do what's most comfortable for them. Most choose to use PDF files, and that works well for much of the work we do (mostly text and spot colors) so the ideal solution would feature some way to share those pdf files and allow commented files to be uploaded.
We've also looked into systems that could be integrated into our MIS system, but we're about a year or so away from changing to a different (as yet undetermined) system, so that's not a hugely critical part of the equation right now. Some of the possible systems have similar functionality built in, so part of me would like to wait, but the boss doesn't want to wait.
Any recommendations for solution that might do all that for us?
Thanks!
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Dave
From checking with our internal users, what I've determined we as a group wants is something that will allow customers (and internal users) to log in, see a list of items they have previously approved and ordered, along with pertinent info on each of those items (part number, past PO numbers & job numbers, thumbnail image, link to approved pdf, etc...). Being able to submit info to initiate a reorder of that item if they so choose is also important, as is being able to initiate a new item by submitting order information and art files. The solutions I've seen offered by vendors that cater to our industry (Esko's Web Center, Hybrid Software's GoPrint/GoProof) do more than what we're looking for -- our internal users don't necessarily need or want the online proofing bit. Our current approval system is somewhat flexible and allows our customers to do what's most comfortable for them. Most choose to use PDF files, and that works well for much of the work we do (mostly text and spot colors) so the ideal solution would feature some way to share those pdf files and allow commented files to be uploaded.
We've also looked into systems that could be integrated into our MIS system, but we're about a year or so away from changing to a different (as yet undetermined) system, so that's not a hugely critical part of the equation right now. Some of the possible systems have similar functionality built in, so part of me would like to wait, but the boss doesn't want to wait.
Any recommendations for solution that might do all that for us?
Thanks!
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Dave