L-Arts

Business software: in-house or external?

The graphic company, L-Arts in Leipzig Germany, is a household name in the field of advertising printing. They can design and produce indoor and outdoor billboards, a variety of large format applications as well as custom-made signage. The result is a wide range of end products: from milled out logos to exclusive and customised signage. With their extensive portfolio the graphics company serves a number of large fast food chains.

Backed by its parent company, a leading and successful advertising group, L-Arts acquired an appetite for expansion. They could see the growth potential, not only in Germany, Netherlands and France but also internationally. However they had to assess the implications and their administrative needs. Building on the infrastructure of their parent company, supplemented by in-house partial solutions the internal admin was proving to be less and less efficient and the workload in the back office was becoming increasingly heavy.

Year after year, L-Arts realised good profits, now their international activities are supporting growth. At the moment, they have 20 employees and they would like to keep it that way. However, with customisation as a trademark, there is a lot of manual handling required and this is time-consuming. As a result, one employee in four is needed for administrative tasks. It was critical that they examined whether their work processes could be run more efficiently.

Administrative management: in-house or external?

The company's work ethic of integrity demanded that the administrative systems be carefully examined. The parent company had long believed in its own custom built software which they call HQ. The in-house application for project management did indeed turn out to work well, but without any links to the applications for logistics and customer management. Moreover, there was no automation of the administration or production processes that was suitable for the present day needs of this graphic production house.

Choice of software supplier: L-Arts takes stock

In the first instance, L-Arts did not want to commit to one supplier without some research and so decided to compare the market offerings. With Dataline's MultiPress, they quickly found the software that met their internal needs and in this case the specific requirements of the large format and signage sector. The added value is obvious: by further automating their production workflow, efficiency increased significantly. The various business processes are clearly better coordinated. One thing is certain: nobody at L-Arts wants to go back to the old setup!

Icing on the cake

Thanks to the handy API link, the MultiPress solution is also connected to HQ, the advertising group's own software. This still provides the CRM, web shop and invoicing components and MultiPress new software guides L-Arts flawlessly through all other processes. The Leipzig-based graphics company is ready for the challenges of today and tomorrow, thanks to Dataline and the unique large-format know-how embedded in MultiPress.