Business Management - Productivity/Process Improvement

Productivity increase is credited as the factor that has made the economy of this country so buoyant for the past decade. The rate of annual productivity increase has far exceeded expectations. It's created billions of dollars in national budget surpluses. By developing an information base from new technology and taking the oftentimes-painful actions mandated by that information, we've succeeded in the transition from a manufacturing to a knowledge economy. We've downsized, outsourced and become increasingly efficient based on information. Our printing industry, however, hasn't really participated in this new, knowledge-driven approach to increasing productivity. Why is that? Why have we lagged behind?

The health services industry has an error record worse than printing. But they bury their mistakes, while much of the time we must redo and remake our boo-boos. In commercial printing, in common with medicine, we have millions of customers with an amazing array of demands. And we also have thousands of practitioners. Communication of customer/patient needs and demands, the raw materials, equipment, training, technologies, interpretations and complexities are almost beyond the grasp of mortal printers and physicians. It's an environment that breeds mistakes and dissatisfactions. Both industries seek to throw a dust cover over this elephant in the living room and

We've never seriously considered process costing for printing, have we? All we know is job cost accounting. That's our business model—our security blanket. We see our business as the sum total of a series of jobs. We may have just about run out of time for that model. It's seduced us into overcapacity and razor-thin margins for years. I'm slowly getting the feeling that things began to change with the fax machine in the late '80s. It got so easy for print buyers to spew out a bunch of "Requests for Quotation" on the fax machine. The feeling of relationships became just a

Why Service Stinks," is the cover story of BusinessWeek magazine for October 23, 2000. Don't be misled by that negative title. If you haven't read it, by all means do so. Businesses and industry are recognizing that their best customers have been subsidizing the cost of servicing marginal customers. It's an awakening provoked by activity-based cost analysis that penalizes the high service cost/low yield customers and passes benefits to the top clients. The implications of this rapidly growing service business model change can be profound for printing. Why is it happening? Managerial accounting is shifting to a new medium, a revised platform. It's

Be careful what you wish for. Your wish might be granted. At this moment, many people involved in printing are wishing for, and spending time and money promoting, digital and specification standards for our industry. I wouldn't dare suggest that they do otherwise lest I be charged with denigrating the flag, motherhood and apple pie. What I dare to remind all well-intentioned parties is that there are tyrannies imposed by the deadly legacies that standards often become. Prime example: the inch, foot, yard and acre are standards in the United States. Try, just try, to change to the metric measure standard in use by

Start with this situation analysis: We can't use monthly financial statements to support operating decisions. There are too many unrealistic assumptions and they're not timely. We're not optimizing liquidity—not turning over inventories and account receivables rapidly enough. Our production reporting is all messed up with non-chargeable labor or machine hours and spurious capacity assumptions. Despite knowing the multitude of variables of printing inputs, we don't acknowledge the application of chaos theory to printing. We set prices for commercial jobs by marking up mythical cost estimates knowing that it is nonsense. We install computer systems that provide stacks of data we either don't use

Cash is a fact; profit is an accounting opinion. That short statement says it all. I picked it up recently in a magazine or newspaper. Somebody said it about the Internet dotcom companies and their IPOs. The stock offering brings in megabucks of venture capital. The companies don't make a profit, but who cares? Profit is an opinion of the bean counters. The stock market investors following the IPO bid the stock up higher and higher. But one day the cash runs out and the bubble bursts. Cash is a fact, not an opinion or forecast of future worth. Either you have cash to

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,