Business Management - Productivity/Process Improvement

Jim, Peter and I have a secret. Jim is James Geinke, president of Arandell Corp. in Menomonee Falls, WI. Peter is Peter Doyle, manufacturing manager at Action Printing in Fond du Lac, WI. Our secret is an exciting old way of constantly increasing the efficiency of a printing plant. Now, you'll read this and either forget it or be unwilling to try it. Well, maybe a couple of readers will give it a go. But Jim and Peter won't keep their productivity train in the station. They're ahead and you'll have to play catch-up. The secret is people: respect, trust and confidence in their

Did the Big Boxes (Walmart and Home Depot) start it? I find it at every post office, at the Safeway, at the Department of Motor Vehicles, at church, at doctor's offices and hospitals—everywhere. Everyone's so darned helpful, courteous, attentive and friendly. (I don't know about New York cabbies, but maybe even they . . . no, that's too much!) It's all up close and personal these days. So huggy. And I love it. Maybe it's a reaction to all those "Your call is important to us. Press five to talk to a human" impersonal answering machine messages. How I despise those. Maybe it's

Discipline, flexibility, planning, responsibility—key ingredients to successfully implementing computer management systems. BY MARIE RANOIA ALONSO The installation of a computer management system is not purely an academic process—it is an arduous, yet ultimately beneficial, production process that must be initiated, controlled and completed without impeding the regular, day-to-day business tasks of any commercial printing operation. Easier said than done. In a perfect world, implementing new software solutions for estimating, electronic job ticketing, job costing, job invoicing, inventory tracking—essentially every administrative data collection component of a print production cycle—would be as easy as sticking a disk into a CD drive and executing a few,

Is there such a thing as "The Printing Business Model?" Not really, because printing—putting ink on paper—is too diverse to be defined by a single business "model." The business model that fits a plant with five heatset web offset and three gravure web presses certainly can't be used to characterize the DocuTech operations at Office Max/Depot or Staples. "Obviously," you chuckle. "Can't compare them to each other." Yet we call them both "printing," don't we? Both are members of the 40,000 business entities that comprise the "Printing Industry" for census classification. What's the problem? Between those extreme models of web printing and document

Most of us in printing use relational database technology for accounting and production files. Job-cost and general-ledger files we keep in relational tables; transaction processing is what we do. That's cool, but industry is zipping by us, leveraging data to make critical decisions. Printers are living in the days of OLTP: Online Transaction Processing. But the world around us is moving into variants of OLAP: Online Analytical Processing technology. Let me use a personal example to illustrate. I've maintained a database of web printers for nine years. It's a "relational" database consisting of four tables or files. Table One is for companies. Each company

I had a call from an investment banker wanting information about the printing industry. In effect, he said: "We understand that the printing industry has a problem of chronic overcapacity, which drives down prices and makes printing companies less than attractive investments. Is this true? If so, why? Is this changing? Where is the data of printing industry capacity to be found?" What shall we say to the banker? For as long as I've been around, the buzz has been exactly as the banker put it: Excess capacity drives down price margins. Agree? William Davis, president of R.R. Donnelley & Sons, put it this

Both Peter Drucker, in his new book "Management Challenges for the 21st Century," and Jeff Papows, in "Enterprise.com," speak of "knowledge workers" as replacing blue- and white-collar workers of the past. Knowledge workers are the people in companies who make decisions. They have the "know how" and "know why" of the business acquired through training, or experience, or both. Their decisions translate to actions that establish the policy and competence of the operation. Knowledge workers receive information, assimilate it, decide what to do and execute decisions. Who Are They? Trouble is we're not accustomed to the concept of knowledge workers as a special classification

Implementing computer management systems arm commercial printers with a key to unlocking print production bottlenecks—on and off the Internet. BY MARIE RANOIA ALONSO Any printer will report that a breakdown in the communication process in any phase of the print production cycle can be debilitating. Printers, quite simply, do not have the luxury of easily absorbing workflow bottlenecks—from the moment a purchase order comes in, through the prepress and printing processes, to the second the product is lifted off the finishing room floor for shipment and the customer, promptly, is billed for services rendered. Good news: There are a host of fine technology

We're aware that general ledger data and reports are not intended, nor useful for, operating decisions. The premise of the general ledger is identification of asset ownership. We also know that our job-cost accounting has an overlay of assumptions of capacity and utilization that impair its usefulness for operating conclusions. Our pricing is essentially marking up estimates of those questionable job costs. The statistical systems we've been using are not adequate tools for print operations managers. So let's concentrate on the kind and quality of information we need to operate a printing business in the 21st century. Just what is the information we really need

"It's the economy, stupid" is the now oft-quoted statement coined by political consultant James Carville during Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign for the presidency. It simplified issues of the Clinton campaign against an incumbent president basking in high opinion poll ratings. The phrase focused that presidential campaign on the concern of a majority of the voters of the country at that time. What Carville did was modify the old KISS principle: Keep It Simple, Stupid. Focus was needed for the campaign, and he supplied it. Simplicity, for Carville, was the economy. "It's the Paper, Stupid!" Now it's our—the printing industry's—time to focus, to simplify. "It's the