Business Management - Productivity/Process Improvement

DON’T BELIEVE the pundits. The U.S. economy will expand, not contract, in 2007-2008, and to an annual growth rate of nearly 4 percent in GDP. This will reverse the downward adjusted 3.2 percent in 2006 and 2005. Our industry should makeready to run forward at near the GDP rate. The reason: print growth is tied to the “knowledge economy,” which is not calculated into GDP while government, an outlay, is. Research and development, if treated as a capital investment rather than as an intermediate expense, boosts GDP by 3 percent and the national savings rate by more than 2 percent. The U.S. accounts

WHEN IS a commercial printing firm not a commercial printing firm? VistaPrint, of Lexington, MA, is neither fish nor fowl. Only 33 percent of its revenues are actually spent on print production. More than 34 percent is earmarked toward direct marketing. Another 11 percent is ticketed toward technology advancement. You call this a printer? Where’s the sales staff? VistaPrint doesn’t have one. Heck, it doesn’t even deal with print buyers. Yet, the company posted sales of $152 million for its latest fiscal year, a 67 percent increase over the $90 million it did the previous year. How can this be a printer?

IN A time when cost savings and technological improvements have been encouraging publishers of printed products to turn their focus toward the Web, add one more reason to the mix: postal hikes. With one hike earlier this year and the latest proposed hike of 11.4 percent for periodicals and 8.5 percent for standard mail, circulation directors are rethinking their strategies and bracing for financial decisions that could be made by higher-ups. Evelyn Adenau, circulation director for 115,000-circulation San Francisco, already budgeted for the first raise in U.S. Postal Service (USPS) rates, but admits that she, along with many others, did not see this second

FOR FRANK McPherson, taking on tough variable data printing (VDP) projects is nothing new. “The first variable data printing job I did was in 1959,” McPherson, president and HDM (head decision maker) of Custom Data Imaging in Markham, Ontario, recalls. “It was a calendar for a pharmacy that was sending out well wishes to some of its customers. We did it with Linotype slugs.” McPherson started his career as a typesetter, and says he has held just about every position imaginable in the industry during his 48 years in the business. He also worked as a consultant for about a decade. But the

ESTIMATING AND pricing are the two most indispensable areas of the printing sales process, according to Gary Cone, vice president of Seattle-based commercial printer Litho Craft Inc., and author of the NAPL book “Price Doesn’t Count.” He notes, however, that although printers sometimes use the terms interchangeably, they are definitely not the same thing—and it’s critical for managers and salespeople to understand the difference. “Estimating is a science—a mathematical calculation based on the job specifications and the variables and parameters of the production process,” he says. “It’s a repeatable process, yielding the same—or close to the same—results each time. “Pricing, on the other hand,

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

“WITH REVERSE auctions, printers are starving themselves based on hourly rates and production speeds. In order to keep up you must buy the newest equipment and pass the running speed savings on to the customer. Where does the money come from for future investments?” asks one writer. He goes on to say, “We have been using market pricing technology for 30 years with great success. Not leaving money on the table has been our secret. Not easy to calculate...” This is the comment from one respondent. I received well over 100 e-mail responses to my March issue article titled “Am I Wrong Here?” Most of

THIS IS column Number 239, which brings the total words I’ve written to 310,700 during nearly 22 years. If I’m not mistaken, that’s more words than “War and Peace.” According to my roster of readers (a sophisticated, digitized database), there are seven people who have read all of those columns. Unfortunately, they are confined to the “home” for life and I’m unable to speak with them. All regular readers of DeWese on Sales know June is the month of my birth and that typically my June column shamelessly celebrates my life. Over the years, I have shared a multitude of my life successes with Printing

SOME 40 percent of the 2,000 largest (non-printing) companies are using what’s called “Dashboard” software technology. That’s the estimate of analyst Keith Gile in a recent Business Week article. (Giving the Boss the Big Picture, 2/13/06). These include Steven Ballmer at Microsoft, Ivan Seidenberg at Verizon Communications, James Campbell at GE and Robert Nardelli at Home Depot. Why? “The more eyes that see the results we’re obtaining every day, the higher the quality of the decisions we can make,” according to Seidenberg. Well, what’s a “Dashboard?” Some new computer gizmo you’ve gotta have that’ll solve all your problems and make you rich? No way. You

“BUT, ROGER, you said nothing about the need for measuring to control when you said farewell to the database you’d kept for many years for web presses. (Riding Into the Sunset, November, 2005.) I want to protest this oversight! It was your steely-eyed declaration of many years that we had to measure, even when measuring the wrong things, to get control of the web press printing process that kept us going and helped bring us to where we are today.” OK, Buck Crowley, dear friend and colleague of many years and inventor of the Autocount for web presses, I hear you loud and clear.