Dataline launched MAS: audit software for razor-sharp business practices
25 July 2022
"Does Automation affect Common Sense?" On that question, Dataline CEO Dirk Deroo held an impressive presentation on 24 May during the Print & Sign Vakdag of PRINTmatters. He explained that MAS is more than a song by Rolf Sanchez: "it's the new Manufacturing Auditing Software from Dataline. With MAS graphic companies can source an extensive report which examines all facets of their business at the highest detailed level."
Deroo inspired his audience in the Nieuwegein Business Center from the very first moment: "I have noticed for years that in the graphics industry, even with a dose of common sense, many thinking errors are made. This makes our common sense a little less sensible than we might like. The founder and CEO of Dataline listed fifteen possible forms of bias, such as people who tend to surround themselves with like-minded people. If they then hear an opposing opinion, they may be more likely to believe themselves rather than what specialists have thoroughly researched beforehand. This is called tunnel vision and can be dangerous if it affects the ability to do business, to automate and to invest. Once we are aware of these different forms of bias, we can recognise them before they influence our judgement and that way make better decisions and do better business.'
Dirk Deroo: Skywalker with Dataline
After a past an as Apple evangelist, Dirk Deroo started developing MultiPress in 1997 in his attic room in West Flanders: a new software for the graphics industry, which was experiencing the transition from a craft to a process-driven industry. Dataline's MultiPress quickly developed from a simple CRM and calculation tool into a powerful, streamlined management system in which administration, calculation, quotation and order management, planning, finance and logistics are all integrated with production. This comprehensive mix leads to maximum automation where the user has "full control". Until 2015 Dataline was only active in the Benelux. At that time over 50% of all the graphic production companies in the region that had an ERP package were using MultiPress!
It was in 2022 that Deroo started a process of internationalization. At present Dataline has sixty employees spread out over five offices in Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, and France. Over a thousand graphic and sign companies in 35 countries now work with the MultiPress software in five different languages. One third of the company's turnover now comes from outside the Benelux region.
As a result of investing over 5000 hours of solid effort in just over three years, at the end of 2021 Dirk Deroo added the free audit software MAS to the Multipress service package. The strategy is that the software will be offered as 'Open Source' software to all graphic machine builders by the end of 2022, and integrated into MultiPress in 2023 for independent use by customers if desired. All these developments have ensured that in recent years, Dataline, along with MultiPress and MAS, has won a large number of awards for growth and innovation.
Acting irrationally with full conviction
Deroo often sees entrepreneurs making completely irrational decisions in order to hold on to a familiar, non-optimal business situation. People are often so stuck in their current ways of thinking and working that they no longer pay attention to the question of how much money can be burned up in this way every month. But suppose you could base your investment decisions on calculated facts and figures. Who knows, a planned investment might not be necessary at all, or postponing automation might actually be many times more expensive than the investment itself. In the latter case, however, another phenomenon plays a role: many tend to focus on the current financial loss instead of seeing the future profit of an investment.
Wrong decisions are becoming unaffordable
Gut feelings and rock-solid, trusted insights are abandoning common sense more often than entrepreneurs would like to assume. According to Deroo, the negative impact of this is growing in these times, which are full of economic challenges and rapid technological developments. The preconditions for doing business in the graphic industry are now more difficult than ever, given, among other things, high paper and raw material prices, staff shortages and ever evolving technologies. Deroo sums it up: "because of this toxic cocktail, entrepreneurs can no longer afford to make wrong decisions based on gut feelings."
Need for software for fact-based insights
But how do you embrace the technological revolution?
As an entrepreneur, how do you make your choices wisely, without prejudice, and adapted to your specific business situation?
With these questions in mind, the former Apple evangelist built the bridge to Dataline: 'Every company is different and in countless ways: the customers you serve, the knowledge level of your employees, the machinery you use as well as the financial parameters. Yet every day choices have to be made - even not choosing is a choice. Our research showed that entrepreneurs need audit software to better justify their choices to themselves, their shareholders and financial institutions such as banks. This applies not only to graphic production companies or sign makers, but also to their suppliers and consultants. They too need more objective insights before making choices or giving advice to third parties.
Investments and their knock-on effect
Deroo explained what he believes is lacking in the current practice of screening (graphic) companies or business units: 'Entrepreneurs who are considering an investment in a new machine, employee or web shop, for example, sometimes make calculations in a spreadsheet. But how do you then deal with the numerous dependencies that play a role in the decision making? If, for example, you want to calculate the payback period of an average sales employee or, of an integrated webshop using an ROI spreadsheet, you have to remember that such an investment affects all business processes. Or, take a new printing press that is five times faster than the current one: it will probably lead to more calculations, a reorganisation of your prepress department, plus it is also questionable whether your current order supervisors will still cope with the higher production. Everything is interlinked. Only with very sophisticated audit software can you calculate all the dependencies and their effects. With over twenty years of expertise in cost price calculation, an understanding of the machines and their processes, the many different software applications involved plus a huge number of benchmarks, Dataline is equipped with every asset to develop its software.
Hard work in the attic
And so it happened that Dirk Deroo used the relative calm during the Corona virus crisis to bundle twenty years of expertise into a unique, comprehensive and independent audit software package to serve the graphic and sign industry. Over a period of three years, he worked on it for thousands of hours, mainly in the evenings. In the Manufacturing Auditing Software (MAS) he has processed more than 130,000 formulas. He explains the results: "You can use this software to audit one or more business processes, but also to calculate the total monthly processing costs for your entire company. Depending on the desired level of detail and the reporting requirements, an audit report can take two hours to three working days to complete. So the question is, "How sharp and clear do you want to see the picture of the monthly processing costs in your company?" Can you live with a blurred picture? Is a bit of insight about a sub-process enough for you? OR - Do you want to see things in your company as they really are? Perhaps these questions are confrontational, but they are the reality? The result of using the MAS software is that you can calculate the real costs per relevant business process and you can optimally analyse whether your business processes are profitable or not. Consequently, you will also be able to provide answers to questions such as: "What is the maximum cost of automation and what should it yield? How long can I postpone a certain investment in automation?"'
When MAS Audit Software offers a solution
All kinds of needs or situations can make the use of MAS Audit software desirable. Deroo mentioned the following frequently occurring needs:
- Gaining insight into the profitability of a particular department or business process, to benefit its own management
- Generating key financial figures, for example at the time of a planned merger or takeover, or to decide whether to keep production in-house or to outsource it
- Auditing one's own company in order to convince lenders of the creditworthiness of an investment or takeover to be financed by them
What the MAS software looks like
What does the MAS software look like on the screen, safely hidden behind a login and authentication? Dirk Deroo designed the screen layout with extreme care: 'On the main screen, all unique company data is managed on the left, such as the number of employees per department, the hourly wages, the number of monthly orders and invoices and the complexity of the orders. Below that, the production techniques that apply to a manufacturing company, such as offset and digital printing, or future production techniques and machines are all indicated and can be selected. The software distinguishes twelve main processes in production, which in turn consist of five to ten sub-processes. For each of these processes, the Audit can indicate how they are carried out now, how they might be desirable in the future, or whether they are becoming irrelevant.
An example: saving 80% on file control
In early 2023, Deroo's MAS Audit software is due to be integrated into Dataline's flagship ERP software, MultiPress. Additionally, companies can ask Dataline for audits of sub-processes or if desired, their entire business. The first fifty graphic production companies at home and abroad have already made use of this opportunity. A quick MAS-audit of a few hours is free, as is the basic version of the MAS-Auditing Report: two A-papers with a report of the most important insights from the MAS-Audit.
As an example of what a MAS-Audit can deliver, Deroo mentioned the main process "Prepress workflow and production optimisation", where he zoomed in on the subprocess "File control". If you really want to know how much all the file checks cost you each month with your current way of working, then the MAS software will calculate this for you in great detail. A lot of audit data is obtained from the shop floor, but in the absence of that, it can also be obtained from benchmarks. In roughly twenty minutes, the exact monthly costs and hours of the current way of auditing files are calculated. At the same time, it is calculated what it would possibly cost if you opted for a more optimised working method: how many hours could be saved then? How many prepress employees do you really need? And how many euros could you save? On the right-hand side of the same Audit screen, you can then see the effect of this optimisation on the various production departments. After all, the outcome can be very different for a digital printing department than for an offset or large format department. Finally, the bottom of the page shows the current monthly costs for this simple subprocess. In the example of a company in Nice, almost 90 hours are spent every month checking all the files before a quotation can be made. That is an average checking time per order of almost eleven minutes. Our MAS audit shows that optimising this small process results in 80% time savings. I can tell you: no gut feeling can withstand this argument.
Dataline: only cooperation with at least 25% profit from automation
Deroo explained that this audit software - although available for free! - helps the business of Dataline in different ways. Dataline has a fairly complex business model. They dont sell ERP software like MultiPress without investigating whether a company is ready for the next level. If the company is based in the Benelux it is fairly easy, but now that customers are spread throughout Europe, it is different and so the software has to be capable of efficiently performing audits at different levels at potential or existing customers' sites. Dataline has twelve project managers who work on six or seven projects per year. Dataline and the customer have a mutual interest in calculating in advance whether there is sufficient financial benefit from adopting a particular automation. At Dataline, we will only continue the conversation with a customer or prospect if the savings are at least 25%, with a considerable financial volume. For example, a graphic company with twenty people employed will have monthly wage costs of around 145,000 euros - a 25% saving is therefore worth something to them. It means real savings in labour costs, machine costs and overheads.
'Every project has dozens of saboteurs'.
Dirk Deroo, the CEO of Dataline finishes by saying: "A company needs such savings in order to make strategic decisions on any major automation project. Individuals themselves are not looking for change but our software affects the whole company, from the front door to the back door. In every project, there will always be 20 or 25 active or passive saboteurs. Maybe, one is about to retire, another is afraid that the audit will show that he or she is not working efficiently. When the audit report reveals sufficient critical mass to start automating, Dataline then dedicates itself to a results commitment. We believe, there is no other supplier in the printing industry that makes this kind of commitment to its customers. We call this a 'Dataline MAS blueprint' a black and white commitment that Process Optimisation can and will be effectively achieved and each and every customer will see future business growth."