David

LEAN, THE practice of continually identifying and eliminating waste in an organization, is very often a misunderstood term or phrase. Too many people associate it with the phrase "Lean and Mean," which has become a euphemism for laying people off, working with too few staff, working staff long hours and micromanaging every activity to lower costs—often at the expense of quality. It's ironic, then, that the practice of Lean is the exact opposite of the phrase "Lean and Mean."

As offset printing gives way to high-speed digital printing, your operators may need time to adjust and accept the changes. By Erik Cagle When Georgia Perimeter College installed an HP Indigo digital color press a year ago, a special training challenge lay ahead for Barbara Lindsay, assistant director of Printing Services. Among the offset press operators who needed to learn how to use the digital device was a 65-year-old man with limited computer experience. "Other than surfing the Web, he was not a computer user," Lindsay relates. "But he was courageous enough and interested in learning a new technology. Plus, he thought it would