The UPS Store

Founded in 1827, Guelph is a thriving community of about 130,000 people in southwestern Ontario. Also known as The Royal City, Guelph is the fifth fastest-growing city in Canada and is consistently rated as one of Canada's best places to live. The city is home to the University of Guelph, which is one of Canada's top comprehensive universities, as well as the Ontario Agricultural College and Ontario Veterinary College. Some of its bigger employers are the University of Guelph, Sleeman Breweries, and Linamar Corporation, among others.

As part of the UPS Store franchise, UPS Store #82 has been serving customers in Guelph since 1998, and is consistently in the top-selling 10 percent of UPS Store franchises in Canada, repeatedly winning the franchiser's Gold Award for sales exceeding $500,000. UPS Store #82 rents mailboxes, provides shipping and packing services, and provides printing services to individuals, small businesses, and corporations.

Most small businesses do not have the resources to do their shipping and printing in-house, and as UPS Store #82's franchisee/owner, Garry Ransom, says, when they partner with UPS Store #82, "Our store is an extension of their office." UPS Store #82 strives to provide excellent service and a short turn-around time, enabling customers to fulfill their printing and shipping commitments quickly and efficiently.

One long-time client of UPS Store #82, ABS Canada, is a large international agricultural company that uses a wide range of printed materials in its day-to-day operations. Sales representatives need varying forms and sell sheets for a wide range of products depending on their department and territory, managers and administrators use yet other forms, and then there is the immense quantity of business stationery that such a large firm requires. The company uses a wide variety of printing, of significant quantity, and must warehouse it and then supply it as needed to employees and customers alike. Ordering, storing, and distributing the printed materials has historically been a formidable and laborious task.

A break from tradition delivers more profits

UPS Store #82 found that the traditional cumbersome and labor-intensive, manual-ordering process was hurting its business. On the consumer side of things, the store's staff had to spend a lot of time walking individual customers through their orders, costing staff and customers alike time they needed for other work, and costing the store money. Notes Ransom, "We were losing individual customers because we just weren't meeting their needs. We were losing some of the larger customers simply because they were farming out some of the other print jobs to other companies." Sometimes, the corporate customer moved all of its business to the competing printer who had filled the gap, and that was a painful blow to UPS Store #82. Clearly, Ransom had to find a way to save time and money, and simplify print procurement for ABS Canada and his other customers. "We needed to find a solution where we could go to our corporate customers and we could offer them some incentive in order for them to do all of their business with us."

Reduced inventory delivers more orders

Prisme Technologies' fully hosted and customized web-to-print software, PrintSYS, gave UPS Store #82 exactly the incentive Ransom's corporate customers needed. "They can order online and they don't have to keep an inventory. At the UPS Store, [Prisme] provided a website that our corporate customers could access, either on the corporation's website or on our website. So far, they have always opted to put it on our website because then we manage the system for them, which is a good way for us to keep them as customers." Each of Ransom's corporate clients now has a customized website branded for that company, stocked with all of the products they need an accessible to their employees at any time, from anywhere. No longer do they have to order huge quantities of print and store them until they are needed. Now, employees can order exactly what they want, and just in time.

Ease of use delivers more customers

Not just the corporate clients have benefited from the new client interface. Through the PrintSYS Store retail website branded specifically for UPS Store #82, "[Prisme] also provided for our individual customers. They provided some excellent templates [customers] could use and could do all of their own data input, such as their name and address and all we need to do is just print out the file." UPS Store #82 has given creative control back to the customers, is saving money and time, and has received very positive feedback from the website's users. As Ransom says, "The PrintSYS web-to-print store has been a great solution for our customers of the UPS Store. I think they appreciate the ease of it more than anything else and it has solved a lot of problems for them. One of our customers did compare to other systems at that time. In fact, in the U.S. they were using a different one and they much preferred the Canadian one to the U.S. one."

Because the PrintSYS solution is fully hosted and maintained by Prisme, UPS Store #82 gets a professional and evolving web store, but doesn't need to have information technology staff to manage it. As Ransom notes, "Prisme has an easy way of doing it. It is very easy to work with and their solution was just really simple and straightforward. That's what I really liked about it. It meant that somebody like ourselves who doesn't have a whole lot of tech support could actually set it up, for Prisme was actually the one that set it up and we're really just using it."

Prisme delivers more benefits

Ransom sees his store's adoption of the PrintSYS client interface as having many and varied benefits for the future of his business. Now that his store is on the web, Ransom can expand his client base far beyond the borders of his town, and can compete on equal footing with much bigger printers. He is able to keep his customers happy through better, more meaningful communication and improved use of time. "We would visualize that in the future we will be able to take in more orders, we are going to be communicating less with our customers on the orders side of it but communicating more when they receive their orders. We are going to require less floor space [for customer interaction], which therefore allows us more floor space for equipment. So we are pretty optimistic about it."

For more information visit UPS Store #82