Improving Your In-plant

In-plants, like their commercial cousins, are struggling with the same two root issues—cyclical and structural changes that are reducing the demand for printed products. The cyclical changes are tied to the economy, while structural changes come from technologies that are disruptive to the printing industry, such as the Internet/e-mail, cell phones and e-books, among others.

While a portion of the demand for print will return as the economy returns (the result of the next wave of cyclical change), structural changes will have more profound and long-lasting results, and the declines resulting from these changes may never rebound.

Just as the root causes are similar for in-plants and commercial printers, so are the strategies to remain viable: increasing operational efficacy and achieving greater success through sales and marketing efforts.

Today's operational focus includes measuring and increasing productivity and customer convenience, and maintaining competitive costs and turnaround times. Measuring and showing improvements are keys to proving an in-plant is competitive with outside providers.

Some of the more common metrics to measure, or benchmark, include budgeted hourly rates, competitive pricing and on-time delivery. All in-plants should be measuring and tracking their financial and operational metrics and working on improving them—before they need to.

Increasing operational productivity and reducing manufacturing costs run hand-in-hand. Driving down the cost of manufacturing also results in shorter turnaround times and more competitive prices. One way to increase productivity is continuous process improvement, or critically evaluating how you do things and always looking for better ways to do them.

Customers' Changing Needs

Today's marketing and sales focus is on listening to customers' changing needs and responding with more value-added services. First, a company or in-plant must understand how well it meets its customers' existing needs; second, it must learn how their needs are changing and build new products and services that reflect those changing needs.

When NAPL evaluates an in-plant, we benchmark financial and operation performance, listen to the voice of the customer (VOC) via surveys, focus groups and one-on-one meetings, and then evaluate the in-plant's strategy and vision. Taking the time and effort to hear the VOC is generally one of the best ways to understand your customers' changing needs, identify service opportunities and learn how to respond to those needs and put more value into your offerings.

The toughest challenge in succeeding with new value-added services, however, is knowing how to sell them. One problem we see all the time is that a printer's customer starts to think about the company based solely on the products it buys from it, e.g., it defines a company as a business card printer, large-format or poster printer, or printer/mailer.

Similarly, an in-plant may be pigeonholed on the basis of the lone service it provides a customer, not on the basis of all the products or services it offers. As a result, it may be thought of just for printing business cards and stationery, and not as a resource for a range of other services. Unfortunately, many in-plants have no idea how much they have been stereotyped by their customers. That is where surveys and focus groups can help. Because one of the most important things an in-plant can do to increase its value, is to start listening.

This column is an excerpt from an NAPL white paper, "The State of Today's In-plant Printer Market."