4
Keeping in-plant print room
business an “inside job”
We’ve talked about the universal challenges that affect
commercial print shops and in-plants. But what about the
unique issues that in-plants face serving internal corporate
customers? The typical in-plant operates on a limited
budget as a cost center on the enterprise balance sheet.
With aging equipment and limited resources, many find it
difficult to satisfy internal customers who require more
sophisticated capabilities and faster turnaround. A large
percentage of jobs are still submitted using the “sneaker
network,” on CD, or as paper hard copy.
Meanwhile, many in-plants struggle with requests for jobs
they do not have the technology to deliver, problems
meeting aggressive deadlines, and customer dissatisfac-
tion. These issues together lead to declining print volumes
and difficulty breaking even. Overcoming these challenges
requires print operations to expand service offerings,
accelerate turnaround, and increase service levels while
keeping a tight rein on the bottom line. While many cannot
afford complete overhauls, incremental improvements like
fast digital printers with expanded workflow capabilities
can provide the boost in-plants need to prevent internal
customers from defecting to outside competitors.
For both commercial print shops and in-plants, achieving sustainable
growth demands business process optimization, an expanded service
portfolio, and the ability to accept and turn around more work faster. In
other words, shifting the balance means becoming a trusted service
provider that can offer customers more business value and real solutions
to real problems. It means being willing to rethink the way you do busi-
ness. Offering more print-on-demand capabilities. And being able to
handle complex jobs with color inserts, tabs, covers, scanning, archiving
and professional finishing. For some operations, it may mean stream-
lining and even re-engineering processes and workflow.
In many cases, the best way to achieve these objectives is high-ROI
digital print and workflow solutions that enable you to capture more
printed pages with fewer resources. In a word, the key to surviving and
thriving is productivity. And those print operations that commit the
time, effort, and resources to maximize productivity will be rewarded
with outstanding business performance and positive financial results.
Productivity Defined
So what is productivity? What impact does it have on your business?
And how does your print operation measure up? More importantly, how
can you become more productive and leverage productivity to enhance
your business?
Random House defines productivity as “a generative source of contin-
uing activity.” Wall Street, the ultimate arbiter of economic
performance, sees it as “the efficiency with which output is produced
using a given set of inputs, generally measured by the ratio of output
to input. An increase in the ratio indicates an increase in productivity.
A decrease in the ratio indicates a decline in productivity.”
In the print arena, productivity can be defined as producing more
output using the same amount of resources—a.k.a. doing more
with less.
Strategy: Drive Productivity
