Bradford & Bigelow — Company on a Mission

Galligan expected the worst. But there were still unpleasant surprises.

“Relocation and transformation is a process you only want to go through once,” he admits. “Until you have done it, you do not realize how difficult, time-consuming, expensive and complex it is.”

Bradford & Bigelow’s suffering was not in vain. A key component of its supply chain solution is a highly automated Digital Book Factory, which sees a roll of paper input at one end of the digital line and bound books flowing off the other end. This application allows B&B to produce shorter runs efficiently for educational customers and, as Galligan notes, obsolescence ranges around 30 percent for textbooks.