Background

Louisiana Digital Reproductions is a small business located in Lafayette, LA. They are a full service large format printing company with the majority of their sales coming from architecture and engineering firms. They are also considered a "plan room" a place where a prime contractor can display a set of construction documents for subcontractors to review in order to bid on the job.

Objectives

As we begin to enter the digital age, their printing industry was seeing major changes with more people using CAD, digital images, and plotter files. This led to more customers submitting disks as opposed to hard copies. Because they currently had no way of submitting large digital orders or to send them back to the customer, they would have to copy the images to a disk and physically transfer them back and forth. This created the problem of overhead cost due to having to have someone pickup and deliver the images, as well as the extra cost and time to transfer on disk. Another issue was hosting plan room jobs in house required that customer come in to view the prints in the store and the extra cost of printing an extra set that was for display purposes only. To meet the demands of their customers and to remain competitive with the surrounding businesses, Louisiana Digital was compelled to offer an online solution to their customers.

Expand business capabilities

Our Solution

We developed a custom integrated solution for Louisiana Digital that consisted of a several parts. The first part was a custom website which marketed the company and allowed users to submit orders, receive downloadable orders, and to view and order plan room jobs. The second part was the web manager, a windows based application that ran on their local server showing the staff at Louisiana Digital incoming and outgoing orders in real time, allowing them to print work orders, manage users, and log activity. The final part of the solution was a windows based plan room manager interface for the staff at Louisiana Digital to create, manage, archive, and display plan room jobs on the internet from their local workstations. The solution expanded their business capabilities and met all of their needs and objectives well. They reduced cost and clutter by replacing a stack of construction documents with a computer. They now had the ability to reach customers around the globe. Also their internal process was improved by having a consistent delivery method of electronic files along with a detailed printed work order instead of inconsistent hand written orders.