Roger Dickeson

THERE DOESN’T seem to be any logical explanation for why people who end up working in printing tend to remain in the industry, often for their entire working careers. It’s surely not due to some chemical brain reaction that occurs in response to the smell of ink pervading a pressroom or the mesmerizing rhythm of high-speed equipment churning out product. Nor is it that these individuals lack the job skills to do anything else. But, when someone gets bitten by the printing bug—causing ink to flow through their veins—chances are they’re hooked for the long haul. That reality helped make it relatively easy for

It's called Value Added in the Ratio Studies of the Printing Industries of America. Or, you can call it PVA for "Process" Value Added—looking at it from inside the shop. From outside the plant—the customer side—we call it PVA for "Perceived" Value Added. It's all one and the same. It's the difference between selling price of manufactured products and the cost of the raw materials converted to those products. Strip away selling price, the cost of raw materials, and outside job purchases and what you're left with is Value Added, either as a percentage or as a number. "Yes, we know all that, Roger.

A Changing Landscape As our industry gears up for the annual GRAPH EXPO and CONVERTING EXPO exhibition next month in the Windy City, it won't necessarily be business as usual. Printing companies across America—small shops all the way up to behemoths like Quebecor World—have been forced to lay off workers and close under-performing facilities. And, in response to many printers' hesitancies to invest in new equipment during these turbulent times, most industry suppliers have also downsized their manufacturing operations and their employee head counts. As painful as it might be, hard times, I guess, call for hard decisions. Long-time contributor Roger Dickeson refers to

"Productivity is simply the ratio of chargeable hours to available man hours." Thus spoke NAPL consultant Bill Herrott at the 1997 Web Offset Conference. So, when the national economists report that "productivity" of the United States is up or down for a recent quarter, are they saying that the national ratio of chargeable hours to available hours rose or fell? In a word: No. When economists say productivity is up, they mean that the value of the gross national product, factored by the resources applied, has risen. Nobody mentions "chargeability." So if Herrott didn't mean the same thing that national economists mean, what did he mean?