RR Donnelley -- Giant Transformation
The fact RRD continues to plod forward with capital expenditures is a tribute to sticking to its guns, though the company could hardly be faulted if it chose to curtail some expansion plans. As rough as 2002 was across the board, the financial printing market was especially taxing. Playing a significant role in capital markets, RR Donnelley felt a tight squeeze.
"The financial printing markets are down more than 50 percent from where they were two years ago," Davis notes. "Fifty percent is substantial, and it has put a strain on our overall performance."
RR Donnelley is in the final year of an $80 million investment initiative designed to implement a standardized technology and metric platform across all of its commercial printing plants. As more customers gravitate toward the just-in-time manufacturing model, the need for a planning tool was essential, according to Haves McNeal, senior vice president of optimization for RR Donnelley. The tool is part of the company's business process redesign (BPR) and will reportedly allow the printer to fully maximize open capacity, in real time, across the board.
"Most publishers are trying to maximize their value and, in doing so, it's requiring us to be very flexible and nimble," McNeal says. "My goal is to be able to move product around from one facility to another. In our old model, it was managed on a plant-by-plant basis, so a given plant would only have visibility to whatever assets they had in their facility. Now we have visibility across the entire company. That reduces our cycle times."
Over the last few years, RRD has done a lot to give customers more time, improve quality and lower supply chain costs by investing in equipment, processes and people, reveals Bob Pyzdrowski, president of operations and RR Donnelley Print Solutions co-leader. "We've added equipment that enhances our ability to satisfy our customer needs for product flexibility, personalization and targeting," he says. "We've established and improved business processes to offer our customers more uniform and timely products and services across our network of plants. We've invested in our people to enhance their skills and improve service to our customers. And we've made significant progress in supply chain management, resulting in reduced costs and improved quality for our customers. We're using these improvements to raise the bar on customer service."
