From “Frustration of No Visibility” to “Show me the Money”

How Digital Room Gained Full Production Visibility with SpencerMetrics CONNECT

One of the largest online printing groups in North America ran a multi-facility operation without a reliable answer to a basic question: how busy are our machines? Do we need a new one? After two years with a system that never delivered, Digital Room partnered with SpencerMetrics CONNECT to quickly scale it across the business.

At a glance

The challenge: a question with no answer

Digital Room’s COO kept asking the question every operations leader eventually faces: how do I know when to buy a new machine? What is the utilization of what we already own? The honest answer was that nobody could say.

“We didn’t have any visibility,” says Drew Butler, Director of Operational Excellence at Digital Room. “Our COO kept asking, ‘How do I know to buy a new machine? What’s the utilization?’ And we couldn’t tell him.”

The company had already invested in a solution. It had not worked. For two years, the previous system could not pull data from the machines, and the software itself was unreliable. “It was like two years of just frustration,” Butler says. “We’d spent a lot of time and effort to get this working, and we could never get it working.”

Plant managers, meanwhile, saw that their equipment was busy all the time. Without data, there was no way to confirm or challenge that perception — and no way to give management the visibility they wanted.

The solution: connect one machine, see data the same day

Digital Room started with SpencerMetrics CONNECT in one facility. The contrast with the previous two years was immediate.

“When SpencerMetrics came along, it was really a nice surprise,” Butler says. “We talk to SpencerMetrics, we say, ‘We want to hook this machine up,’ and it’s seamless. They go in and they hook it up, and we’re starting to get data right away — which we never had before. So it’s kind of spoiled us.”

That onboarding speed and immediate visibility became the deciding factor for the rollout. “It was so easy. We would just call and say, ‘We want to hook this machine up,’ and they would do it within a day or so. At first we were like, ‘This can’t be right. It’s too easy,’ after all we had been through.”

CONNECT gives Digital Room multiple views of the same data. At the equipment, operator dashboards show how each shift is performing — actual printing time, downtime, and jams as they happen. Above that, the operational excellence team and the executive team can look at overall Utilization metrics or can drill into any individual job across the month and see the actual ink, labor, and paper cost behind it.

The results: facts that changed the “we are busy perception”

The first thing the data did was change the conversation on the floor.

“We can go in and look at the dashboards and see, ‘Hey, we’re only running three hours a day on this piece of equipment,'” Butler says. “All the plant managers are like, ‘No, no, no, we’re running that all the time.’ And I’m like, ‘No, you’re only running three hours a day of printing. You’re not running 24 hours.’ And they don’t believe it. And then we show them the data, and we show them all the downtime.”

The pattern repeated as more machines came online. “They always say it’s really busy. Is it really busy? What’s the utilization? And we found that usually it wasn’t. There was a lot of downtime, or they weren’t running at certain times during the shift. It was eye-opening.”

The same data changed Digital Room’s position with its equipment vendors. When new printers arrived and initial utilization didn’t meet expectations, Butler sent the vendor CONNECT screenshots. “I’m like, ‘We’re only running three hours a day. We have a lot of this downtime.’ And they couldn’t believe it either, but it got attention very quickly. They came in and they helped us, and it made a difference. When you have data and facts, it makes a huge difference.”

For the COO, CONNECT delivered what the previous two years never had: numbers he could act on. “Our COO is a financial guy, so he’s always like, ‘Show me the money.’ We never had that information before — it was kind of the broad-brush approach. Now I can actually say, ‘This is what our ink cost last month,’ down to the few dollars. He loves to see how we’re doing and compare the different facilities, and we could never do that before.”

The relationship: “Yeah, we can do that”

Butler describes the engagement less as a software purchase than as a working partnership. “I’ll call SpencerMetrics and say, ‘Hey, can we do this?’ And they’re always like, ‘Yeah, we can do that,’ or they’ll find out a way to do it. They’ve been really great to work with.”

Digital Room is now beginning to explore Q, SpencerMetrics’ AI-powered production analytics module, on top of the CONNECT data it has built up across its facilities. “It’s been really a great relationship,” Butler says.