Integrated Website / Intranet

My Girl Friday & MGF Network

Situation at Hand:
My Girl Friday is a personal concierge company based in Cincinnati, Ohio. Over the past few years, My Girl Friday has expanded ten-fold. As everyone knows growth is good, but also brings with it challenges. The two main challenges for MGF were processing projects on a timely basis and coordinating her staff in performing these tasks.

My Girl Friday was also beginning to sell franchises and expand her franchise network. She needed a tool that would enable franchisees and the corporate office easy, efficient communication. An expensive mainframe network system would need to be deployed, but this was not an option due to the capital expenditure required.

Solution:
PPC Communications developed a website with a shopping chart - to order services - and integrated it into the MGF intranet. This allowed MGF to process more orders and improve the efficiency of scheduling staffers to perform the related services. The MGF intranet allowed them to keep track of orders, customers, prospects, and agreements. It also had an area for document management, scheduling, and group collaboration.

The biggest advantage was that the time to deploy the website and intranet was minimal and the outlay of cash was minimal compared to a mainframe network system.

Customer Remarks:
"In 2002, PPC Communications partnered with My Girl Friday to create an intranet portal, a new website, and a shopping cart to make ordering concierge services available on the internet.

The team is consistently willing to make changes, offer solutions, and strategize to make the internet experience easy for our employees and our customers. I have had only positive interactions with Mike and his team.

PPC has broadened our knowledge of internet communications and helped us to understand how key an online strategy is to long term growth."
Julie Hagenmaier ( President )


Print Case Study

Systecon Inc.

Situation at Hand:
Systecon had spent an inordinate amount of money with a local advertising firm to design product brochures. Their last three pieces lacked any sort of consistent brand or design concept. They did not match each other or any previous pieces Systecon had produced.

While the advertising firm may have had strong design proficiency, they lacked the basics of actual printing. Once a brochure was ready for print, they always recommended a large order quantity to keep the per piece price down. Needless to say, Systecon always had abundant out of date brochures -- an inventory that still exists today!

Solution:
PPC Communications started working with Systecon - not to produce their next brochure, but rather to take one step back and begin by explaining the branding concept and how an overall consistent design concept was important to maintain in order to reach their market. The branding concept Systecon needed to carry them into the future.

PPC produced an 8.5 x 11 brochure with a clean and strong technical layout. It was an angular layout with column rules and lots of white space. On the production of THIS brochure, we recommended digital printing for a more economical price at a smaller quantity. No out of date excess is produced and no print quality is lost with this technology. As well, we recommended using their website to store all brochures in PDF format for access by any of their representatives or customers.

Customer Remarks:
"As a small engineering and manufacturing company, we never had a marketing department. Prior to using PPC, we would hire marketing and design consultants to help produce our literature. There was no continuity and no thought on the consultants part about printing costs. We were always over budget on design and printing costs, and could not produce as many pieces as was needed. PPC streamlined our literature, made it all consistent and could accurately determine the cost to print each piece. With their help, we have produced more pieces at a lower cost, our catalogs look streamlined, efficient and cost effective. This was important to our clients, because it reflected on our sales strategies and what we offer our end users. PPC also redesigned our website to match our literature, with download capabilities of our literature. This has further reduced our printing costs and has made us a truly integrated company."
Jim Schlachter ( Director of Engineering, Systecon, Inc. )


Shopping Mall Study

Threesource Inc. & Feenix.tv

Situation at Hand:
Threesource Inc., a Chicago-based fulfillment center was experiencing increased costs of doing business due to the individually detailed management of each customer. For example, a customer would send orders via email or fax. Threesouce would then manually enter each line item into their own accounting system to track inventory and sales. This painstaking and not so cost effective procedure resulted in minor re-keying mistakes in virtually every line item, which lead to higher expenses.

Solution:
PPC Communications developed an integrated shopping mall for Threesource that significantly lowered their processing costs while eliminating all the human error. Here's how the system works. Threesource, Inc. gets a custom shopping cart that runs within their website. As Threesource's customers enter orders, it each one is stored on PPC's web server under Threesource's account. A data export routine is run every night exporting all their stored data into a comma-delimited file. Threesource then FTP's the export file into their server and imports this data into their accounting system. This alleviates all their re-keying errors and has made their business more effective in completing the processing and shipping of their client's products.

PPC Communications
Copyright 2007