LaminatedFILMS & PACKAGING

Before

Before hiring Silver Lake, Laminated could track the cost of raw materials by product, but they couldn’t quantify costs associated with other critical profitability drivers like labor per product, supply delays, capacity constraints, custom printing or rush jobs.

After

Silver Lake worked with the president and her team to understand the workflow associated with each step of the order cycle and provided three critical areas of value:

1. Best-practices database structure. Before doing the development work, Silver Lake engaged in an extensive discovery process to map workflows, identify obsolete functionality and identify new features and opportunities for the company. Silver Lake saved the company 25% of development time in conversion immediately and, later, enabled them to add functionality while maintaining the integrity of the system.
2. Comprehensive view of all drivers of profitability, delivered in easy-to-read reports. Based on the workflow analysis, Silver Lake developed a data management and reporting system using Laminated’s existing FileMaker software, providing insight into:
   • Supply management. Scheduling and availability of raw materials.
   • Manufacturing capacity. Planning for new orders, estimated production dates and quantifying the cost of machine usage.
   • Labor and other resource allocation. Quantifying the amount of time and labor needed for each step of order fulfillment process.
   • Custom printing and other customization costs.
   • Delivery management. Scheduling delivery, expediting rush jobs, and passing on shipping costs to customers.
3. Training. An often-overlooked component of database development is training. If staff can’t run the reports, the new data is useless.