Linardatos Publishers: stock, production and sales in one system

Linardatos Publishers sells eight lines of product: diaries, notebooks, cards, indexes, plastic items, advertising items, almanacs and other goods. Its year starts on 1 May, when the next season's range goes on sale.

A diary is more than a name and a price. It has a material, a binding, a printing method, colours for the cover, spine, pages and lining, and extras such as a ribbon, a map, a pen holder or rounded corners.

Before 2017, all of this lived in Excel and PDF files, and every day's sales were typed into the stock files by hand. A simple question, "how many do we have?", meant adding up the last stock count, the goods received, the sales, the damages and the stock sent to suppliers. Then someone had to remember what was promised to customers and what was still on its way.

Most production went through outside printers, binders and finishers, and following each job depended on email and memory. The sales figures a manager needed were put together by hand each time.

Vasilis mapped how products, stock and jobs moved through the company, then built one Windows desktop system around that flow, on a single database the whole office shares.

• One catalogue. Every product has its code, season, shelf position, cost and catalogue price. A diary records its full print specification, chosen from shared lists, so the same specification is always described the same way.
• Stock from every movement. Goods received, sales, stock sent to suppliers and damages are each recorded as a movement. The system works out the stock of any product from the last count and every movement since. It also shows what is on hold for customers and what is still due from suppliers.
• One daily sales file. Every working day the team uploads one file with the day's sales. The system matches each line to its product and customer, keeps the catalogue price and cost beside the sale price, and lists any line it could not match so someone can fix it.
• Production with suppliers. Each job is split into stages, each sent to a supplier for one kind of work. Every stage records its cost, the date promised, the date it came back and the quantity delivered.
• Quotes with their costing. A quote lists its products with the printing, paper, cover, ribbon and box options, the final cost and a written cost analysis.
• Reports and access. The reports cover product status, sales with the discount on every line, warehouse value, open jobs and each supplier's record, and they export to Excel. Administration, accounting and logistics each see only the screens their work needs.

The system was built to last. Its business rules sit apart from the screens and the database, and automated tests cover the stock calculation, the sales upload and the warehouse movements. In 2023 it moved to a new hosted database without changing how anyone works.

The redesign of editorial and dispatch work at Linardatos Publishers is a separate case study, "Linardatos Publishers: where MERA started".

To size the gain, the office time of each task was estimated twice: with spreadsheets and PDF files, and in the system. The daily sales file is real, as is one day of 478 sale lines. The other volumes and the minutes are assumptions.

• Stock and production admin fell from about 1,310 hours a year to about 280, a drop of about 79%.
• A typical day of sales and stock work takes about 36 minutes, instead of about three hours. That day covers the sales file, about eight movements and about ten stock questions.
• The time returned is about 1,030 hours a year, around two thirds of a full-time role.
• Every stock figure is worked out the same way, from the last count and every movement since.
• Every sale keeps the catalogue price and cost beside the sale price, so the discount is visible line by line.
• Supplier delays are measured job by job, not remembered.

The time figures are estimates, not measurements.