Business Management - Operations

As an Association Professional, I am dealing with business owners and their employees every day. I hear their hopes and fears, triumphs and woes. I am often asked how belonging to the association will bring them more business.

Mohawk will launch Project Streamline, a strategic consolidation of its core paper lines, taking 22 paper grades (brands) down to six. The company will focus its manufacturing exclusively on high-margin papers and products that will bring distinct value to the new generation of print customers.

Thomas Rabe, who took over as CEO of Bertelsmann this year, said the company was looking for ways to accelerate its move into digital businesses and developing economies. While Bertelsmann’s portfolio includes the publisher Random House and the developer of international television hits like “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,” 80 percent of the company’s revenue comes from slow-growing Europe.

“Clearly if we are going to make more strategic and sizable investments, then more capital will be required,” Rabe said during an interview in Berlin.

Rabe said an initial public offering was only one of several capital-raising options being considered by Bertelsmann.

Don Johnson won a total of $15 million playing Blackjack at three Atlantic City casinos. In the casinos’ desperation to get him in the door, they essentially gave him 50/50 odds. I know an empty press schedule is scary, but like the casinos, we printers need to keep track of the numbers and verify them for ourselves before we, like the casino managers, walk off the cliff like lemmings.

The agreements include a 10-percent reduction in hourly rates along with various adjustments to vacation, health benefits and work rules to provide Catalyst with a competitive labor cost structure. They cover more than 1,000 workers at its Crofton, Port Alberni and Powell River mills.

The potential purchaser of the idled [NewPage] Port Hawkesbury paper mill has almost worked out an electricity deal and has contacted the union to start labor negotiations, the bankruptcy monitor revealed. Extensive negotiations between Pacific West Commercial Corp. (PWCC) and Nova Scotia Power Inc. have been “constructive,” and the companies “are working toward finalizing an agreement on the supply of energy to the company,” Ernst & Young said in a report to a Canadian bankruptcy court.

PWCC has said that obtaining favorable electricity rates was a major condition of it buying the mill and restarting its world-class supercalendered paper machine.

Contrary to certain media reports, this is not a bankruptcy proceeding. Catalyst Paper will continue to operate and satisfy its obligations to trade creditors, customers, employees and retirees in the ordinary course of business during this restructuring process.

The company has not taken the recession lying down. Faced with declining revenues, management has expanded into different services (most notably its powersites operations which allow small businesses to set up their own template-driven domain, receive a unique phone number and domain based email account (for HHS’ analytics) and invested in automation and other technologies which reduce its costs.

St. Marys Paper is in receivership after the papermaker’s longtime insurer pulled its coverage. With the mill unable to find another carrier, its first secured party, International Forest Products, petitioned to have St. Marys put into receivership, said CEO Dennis Bunnell.

“I really believe this mill could be revived and operate,” said Bunnell.

St. Marys went bankrupt in 2007 and was purchased months later by a local group of investors.

Equipment problems and difficult market conditions have meant little work for the super-calendar producer’s more than 300 employees. St. Marys has only been operational four months in the last two years.

When long-time friends and colleagues Norm Friedman and Daniel Luka decided to launch Skokie, IL-based DreamWorks Graphic Communications, the partners acquired all of the assets of a 60,000-square-foot commercial printing business and, in just five months, completely renovated the facility, brought in new equipment and hired a full staff.