Ensuring on-time job completion is vital to the success of any print production team. It’s even more important when deciding how to manage service level agreements! At PageDNA, we help our printers efficiently manage SLAs every day.
What Is an SLA?
A Service Level Agreement (SLA) is a legally binding contract or agreement between a company and an outside service provider. The SLA details the outside vendor’s expectations and outlines any consequences the vendor may face if they fail to meet those expectations.
For print shops, an SLA is usually between the shop (in this case, the external vendor) and the entity receiving their services. Their main function is to ensure jobs are sent on time.
How to Manage Service Level Agreements with PageDNA
Managing multiple SLAs at one time can quickly become difficult for print shops, especially if you try to do it manually. That’s why PageDNA has built-in, automated features that make managing SLAs easy and simple.
Set Customer Expectations Early
With so many services offering instant delivery, people today are only getting less patient. As a printer, you know customer expectations aren’t always realistic, especially when you can see the 50 jobs ahead of theirs in the queue. That’s why PageDNA helps you keep customer expectations in line.
At PageDNA, when customers add items to their basket via your online storefront, they can be prompted to ask when they need their items delivered. You can program your storefront to set a minimum number of days to turn around a job. Doing this stops customers from ordering something with an impossible timeline. You can even add the option for a rush job at an additional fee.
Ensure Receipt of Order
Ensuring you or your external print vendors receive an order is a great way to avoid jobs getting lost and to reinforce responsibility. PageDNA offers two ways to ensure orders, artwork, and specs are properly received.
Vendor Email Verification
You can set up your PageDNA storefront so that you and any external vendors automatically receive an email letting everyone know that an order has come through. However, email deliverability is a big deal – how can you ensure the email won’t go to spam or accidentally be deleted?
- We use various technologies, such as DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), to digitally sign outgoing emails, ensuring they are delivered as legitimate emails.
- If all else fails, you can always use our Order Manager, which shows all unshipped items and allows you to filter by need-by date.
Automated MIS Integration
If your print shop uses a Print MIS, PageDNA “plays well with others” – PageDNA integrates with several systems to make automatically managing service level agreements even easier. We also take precautionary measures to ensure jobs don’t get lost if your system goes down:
- If your Print MIS connection is down, our system will first try to send the job again. If that doesn’t work, PageDNA automatically begins queuing jobs and sends an alert within your MIS.
- If the problem continues, one of our team members will personally let you know. This is an unparalleled service that PageDNA offers. You might be surprised by the number of times we’ve called a printer, and they didn’t even know their system was down!
- While the MIS is down, our web to print software adds orders to the queue but holds off on sending them until the system is restored. Once back up and running, your MIS will receive every order in the order it was received. No dropped jobs. No duplicates.
Guarantee On-Time Printing and Shipping
PageDNA’s unshipped items report is a production manager’s best friend. This automated report is part of our powerful reporting functionality and contains a list of all late jobs that haven’t been sent out yet. If any orders are lost, you can quickly re-send them to ensure they get done on time.
You can schedule the report to run as frequently as you want, such as every day or business day. You can also choose to only receive the report if there are items on the list. That way, if you receive the report one day, you know there’s a problem.
There are also options for receiving the report – via mail, an encrypted folder, or secure file delivery. You can even have the report delivered to an external vendor to ensure accountability on all ends.
Manage Service Level Agreements for Print With PageDNA
PageDNA is proud to help our print production teams manage service level agreements easily and efficiently. Our automated functionalities are the results of 28 years of continuous improvement and listening to customers to refine integrations. We love working with our customers to constantly improve – and we’d love to work with you.
If you’re ready to learn more, email sales@PageDNA.com for a free demo or fill out our form.
