An introduction...
So just incase you don’t know who I am! I’m Robert, I’m the Operations / Technical Director @ Graphic Warehouse. But I’m not here to talk about me today! Today we’re looking at all the stuff that makes Graphic Warehouse work! And no that doesn’t mean printers (or people, though they are very important!). This post’s context is Software.
Digitally Dependent!
We are massively digitally dependent in Graphic Warehouse, what do I mean by digitally dependent? I mean literally every step of our system from sales through to invoicing has some sort of software managing it.
This post is a sort of introduction to the backend stuff that makes us work, as when you break it down we use a lot of different pieces of software (we get asked about it all the time!)
So I thought it would be relevant to make a small list of the software we use in the business on a day to day basis.
Just a few pieces of software...
 | Matic Track Basically the heart of our operation, I’ll do a separate post about this in the furture. It’s our primary ERP / MIS and manages everything from Sales/Quotations through to Artwork and Invoicing.
I’ll do a further info post about this in the near future. | |
 | Rocket.Chat It’s an open source version of Slack / Microsoft Teams that enables real time communication between team members. 90% of our internal emails were replaced with this.
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 | Asana Task management! We used trello and then switched back to Asana, it’s allows us to create list of tasks & sub-tasks between team members. It’s great for managing projects & for reminding us to do recurring tasks e.g. do the fire checks!
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 | Zammad Ticket management, up until 2019 we were using good old emails to manage 90% of our enquiries. The problem is as you scale up transparency between our customer service team started to become a problem (oh I didn’t see that email!). Zammad acts as a giant email inbox manager for our customer service team.
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 | FreePBX It’s our phones! We switched to VOIP in 2011 and this manages all our phone lines. (When Covid-19 hit and we switched our customer service team to remote working, it had very little effect on how we operated because of this)
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 | OpenVPN This runs our VPN (Virtual Private Network), usually I wouldn’t advertise it as it’s pretty boring! But in the world of Covid-19 this saved our bacon, in simpliest terms it allows our remote workers to pretend like they are still working in our office.
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 | Sendy Our email marketing software, basically allows us to send out 500,000 emails for about £33 but requires you to self host.
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 | Mautic Our marketing automation software, allows us to automate emails, chase ups and set up reminders for our customer service team automatically based on how our customers interact with our websites.
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 | Xero Our accounting software, not much to say it runs our accounts and payroll.
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 | Adobe Creative Suite Every Graphic Designers favourite toolkit!
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 | Corel Draw Suite Every Sign Makers favourite toolkit! (Though this is a bit debate in the preproduction team!)
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 | Microsoft 365 Microsoft office! Whats more to say
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 | Zimbra It’s an open source alternative to Microsoft Exchange / Office 365, it basically manages our user emails
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 | Tawk It’s our live chat software, it should be at the bottom left of this screen!
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And we use them everyday!
Yep! And thats not even talking about all the boring stuff that goes on in the background that nobody knows about!
You might have noticed if you look closer, a lot of the systems we implement are open source. Luckily we have the skills in house to implement these options!
Got any questions or want to feedback what you use?
You can either email me direct (blog@graphicwarehouse.co.uk ) or you can post a comment below!
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