By Significans Automation
Work House Signs, a Pottstown, PA-based online signage printer and seller, has over 500,000 designs for sale on five platforms—Amazon, eBay, Etsy, Walmart, and its own website. With a staff of eight, it creates thousands of signs every week. But there were major challenges. “Designing, printing, and cutting them in house was a very manual, time-consuming process,” recalls Rob Cole, president/owner, Work House Signs. “We had great success, but to continue growing we needed to post as many product listings as possible online, which we were also doing in a manual, time-consuming way.”
Ultimately the company couldn’t list any more products because staff were spending all its time managing incoming orders manually. “We hit a wall because we couldn’t increase sales. We needed to find solutions to eliminate those costly hours that were being spent on getting products already sold to production, then out the door,” says Cole.” So, in February 2024, he contacted Significans Automation for an assessment.
Led by Sean Davis, VP of technology, Significans, a combination of Enfocus Switch, PitStop, and Phoenix software were deployed to integrate with the company’s various online orders, which were delivered using ShipStation software. The objective was to significantly reduce human touchpoints and repetitive tasks. The Enfocus Switch application, Fuzzy Matcher, created by Significans was also deployed. This artificial intelligence technology identifies similar but not identical elements in large sets of data. In this case, it drastically reduced the time required to search the over 500,000 sign options available on Work House Signs’ five online platforms.
Quick Processing and Constant Monitoring
“The new, customized software setup ultimately led to freeing up labor, so we could focus on growing the business rather than maintaining it,” says Cole. “The new software can even create images. It took us three to four years to get to 100,000 listings. With the new technology, for example, we recently created 38,000 signs in just one evening. That would have previously taken us about four months. This, I believe, will eventually allow us to boost our sales tenfold.” In other words, 3,024 hours—18 weeks—of job processing was reduced to just six hours.
“The highly customized software we deployed is checking for new orders awaiting shipment every five minutes,” reveals Davis. “Plus, when those orders arrive, there could be multiple items within one order to process. So, we could be processing literally hundreds of orders and combinations per day.”
“Midway through the project we were trending to 24 hours of weekly return on investment (ROI) recovery,” shares Marc Raad, president, Significans. “At every stage of a project, our team usually offers the client a new, automated development process to implement. This allows customers like Work House Signs to embrace more automation initiatives with quick wins. Today, the ROI is 68 hours of total labor recovery per week—that’s an awesome leap.” Within weeks, Work House Signs maximized on the intended software automation investment. The early deployment of customized solutions provided immediate gains, allowing the company to catapult its growth from the outset.
For more information on Work House Signs visit them at sofarack.com or Amazon, eBay, Etsy, and Walmart. For an assessment of your workflow software systems call Significans at 877-463-4465 or visit significans.com.
Feb2025, Digital Output
