Dickeson--"Ground Truths," Sound Advice

Products must become more flexible to meet changing customer demands and needs. Printers must develop partnering relationships with customers and suppliers.

Changeovers that we call make-readies must be shortened by orders of magnitude. Inventory turnovers must be drastically reduced.

It never ceases to shock me, for example, that printers store paper supplied by publishers. By and large, publishers appear to have scant regard for low turnover—a costly application of scarce capital resource. They pile up stocks of paper worth millions of dollars in printers' warehouses.