Business Management - Operations

Müller Martini is not the only finishing manufacturer facing tough times. As the printing industry consolidates, there is a small flood of very recent vintage saddle-stitchers, folders, perfect binders, collators, diecutters, and other bindery machinery on the market as the result of closed shops.

There needs to be standardized processes for every area of your operation, not just vague assignments that leave a new employee to figure out some kind of procedure that may or may not fit with your organization. Give your new employee an established procedure for performing important tasks in your operation, and the new hire will be empowered to hit the ground running.

Surveying helps preserve your brand on social media review sites. Surveying is a customer early warning system. If you are getting timely feedback, you are able to react before customers leave negative comments on social media sites. Customers now have the upper hand.

In a world where information is transmitted digitally, print mediums have been in decline. For decades, Mohawk Fine Papers' flagship paper was super-fine, a high-quality paper tailored for use on high-end art prints and books.

While the mill still produces such traditional papers for those end uses, Mohawk has been able to successfully market its super-fine to online end users.

Mohawk was able to find this new market by creating a new strategy—instead of waiting for business to find them, they have been seeking new and innovative ways to find and create demand.

NewPage paper company will temporarily lay off about 120 hourly maintenance workers (at its Rumford, ME mill) next week, mill spokesman Anthony Lyons said Tuesday.

A couple of years ago, the company idled some of its paper machines at Rumford Paper, temporarily laying off between 50 and 300 workers.

The latest layoffs come four months after NewPage cut 5 percent of its workforce nationwide. The cuts resulted in nearly four dozen mill workers from the Rumford mill losing their jobs.

We can’t change basic personalities, but we can alter behavior if we are proactive in dealing with both negative and positive instances. We have the right and the responsibility to form our companies with the values and a culture to which we subscribe. Why let our company drift toward values that we do not believe in? One minute coaching can be a valuable tool if we learn to practice it regularly.

Mark Hahn, CFO/COO and corporate development officer of FLM Graphics with locations in Fairfield, NJ, and Princeton, NJ, shares the latest deals, court filings and closures in the printing, packaging, paper and related industries.

If you have not used the Printing Impressions job posting site on PIworld.com, I recommend you give it a try. I recently assisted one of our franchise members with recruiting a production manager, and we used the site. Within two weeks of posting the job, we received more than 40 resumes.

At the University of Chicago Booth School of Business’ Management Conference last week, I had the pleasure of attending one more lecture by James Schrager, clinical professor of entrepreneurship and strategic management. In his lecture, Schrager presented a very simple tool to analyze our business success.

KPS announced in April it was acquiring Thilmany Papers, which has mills in Kaukauna (WI) and De Pere (WI), from Packaging Dynamics. It announced previously it was buying Wausau Paper’s specialty paper business.

KPS now has definitive agreements to buy both operations it said in a statement Monday. The deal is expected to close by summer. “We are very excited to create Expera,” said Raquel Palmer, a representative with KPS, a New York-based private equity firm.

She said the combined operations of Wausau Paper and Thilmany will make Expera a leading manufacturer of specialty paper.