Editor's Note: This is the 14th installment in the monthly series on The F.P. Horak Co., a Bay City, MI-based printing firm pursuing ISO 9002 registration. During an ISO audit, one major non-compliance can mean the difference between success and failure. That doesn't leave much room for mistakes. Fortunately, The F.P. Horak has remained largely within compliance (knock wood) so far. A recent pre-assessment failed to uncover any serious errors in Horak's quality system. The company finds comfort in the fact that the registrar representative walked away from the pre-assessment without any worries. Still, Horak remains vigilant against major non-compliances. After all, the pre-assessment was only
Recall Dr. Quincy, the television series pathologist? He conducted postmortem examinations of bodies of crime victims. I caught a rerun the other day of that old Jack Klugman series, and it triggered some thoughts about costing and printing—if you can imagine that! When I talk about "job costing" with a printer, the usual response is, "Yeah, we've got a terrific estimating system." We have a tendency to equate job costs with cost estimating and often overlook perhaps the major value of a job costing system. We should play Quincy with our cost accounting system. Dr. Quincy didn't try to predict when a given person would die
According to Plutarch, Julius Caesar, passing through a poor village in the Alps, remarked, "I would rather be the first man here than the second in Rome." Now we all know that Julius was a very ambitious man. He possessed many of the qualities—like ambition—that printing company owners might like to see in sales personnel.
It's Super Bowl Sunday, the game is on the tiny TV here in my office, Brett Favre has just thrown a touchdown pass to Antonio Freeman—and here I sit writing this column. Boy, am I a loser. Seems like I should have been invited to at least one Super Bowl party. I think someone should have asked me over to see the game on a big-screen TV. Wow, Terrell Davis just ran one in to tie the score. I think I'll try to finish this column before the game ends. I'll watch the game with my left eye and write with my right
Editor's Note: This is the 13th installment in the monthly series on The F.P. Horak Co., a Bay City, MI-based printing firm pursuing ISO 9002 registration. ISO expects certain things from compliant companies. One hundred and thirty certain things, to be exact. That's the number you get when you add up all of the elements and subclauses that an ISO-registered organization must follow. Some people refer to the 138 things as directives. Kevin Krzyminski, quality assurance manager at The F.P. Horak Co., prefers to call them "shalls"—as in "You shall do this" and "You shall do that." Auditors make sure that companies questing for ISO certification
You're bowling. You heave the ball. It's halfway down the lane when the lights go out. You hear the pins rattling, but how many went down? Similarly, many printing companies are working in the dark. The folks see and hear the work going on everyday. They roll the balls down the alley, but then the lights go out. They never get to see the results. Why? Data paranoia. How long would you continue to bowl if you never saw pins fall? Never knew your score? You just wouldn't have the incentive. So how do we expect people to have incentive for the work they do? Unreasonable
My pal, Warren "Jaydee" Thornton, and I were having lunch at Little Bit's Barbecue just north of Sheffield, AL, back in November. I'd gone down for the grand opening of the new North Alabama Manauqua Casino, the newest of the Indian reservation casinos to open. Jaydee, you will recall, is the proud owner and president of Jaydee's Lithographic Printing. He's partial to Little Bit's chopped pork, and I could die for the all-you-can-eat dinner of fried catfish. I was about two bites away from a powerful need for seven Tums when Jaydee brought up his latest salesperson disaster. You regular readers will recall that Jaydee was
Editor's Note: This is the 12th installment in the monthly series on The F.P. Horak Co., a Bay City, MI-based printing firm pursuing ISO 9002 registration. Two pieces of free advice. First, always schedule a pre-assessment before attempting an actual ISO audit. Second, never schedule a pre-assessment immediately after an internal audit. These words of wisdom come courtesy of Kevin Krzyminski, The F.P. Horak Co.'s quality assurance manager. He speaks from experience. Horak's pre-assessment, a mock audit conducted by a registrar representative, took place a mere two days after management review—the meeting where Horak's Quality Council went over the outcome of the internal audit. To give the internal
The winter months tend to signify the need for more—more clothing for facing frigid temperatures, more wood for the fire—and, this winter, if you happen to be a printer or publisher—a bit more money set aside for paper expenses. As predicted, the fourth quarter of '97 saw an average increase of about 3 percent—and another increase is set to go into effect the first of January. "This comes on top of a roughly 10-percent increase over the last nine months," notes Bruce Janis, president of MSPGA: Management Science for the Publishing and Graphic Arts (www. mspga. com). "We should see a
