IPMA Flashback: Become a ‘World Class In-plant’
Howie Fenton, InfoTrends consultant, presented the keynote address at the 2015 IPMA conference in Orlando, Fla.
At the 2015 In-plant Printing and Mailing Association conference, in Orlando, Fla., Consultant Howie Fenton provided some of the event’s most compelling statistics and advice during his keynote address on “What makes a World Class In-plant.”
Fenton confronted the outsourcing trend head-on, noting that facilities management companies continue to approach C-suite executives trying to convince them that print is not their companies’ core competency and that outsourcing would help them save money.
Yet many of these outsourcing arrangements fail, Fenton reported, or don’t result in cost savings. He pointed to a Booz Allen Hamilton white paper, which concluded that outsourcing does not always cut costs; more than half the companies that have outsourced services report problems, he said, and 25% fail within two years. Half fail within five years.
One pitfall of outsourcing, he said, is that while the service level agreements may show reasonable charges for work, the “exceptions” (e.g., rush jobs, repairing files) are charged at higher rates. One in-plant Fenton recently worked with recorded 279 such “exceptions” over a year, which equaled nearly half a million dollars in extra charges.
Fenton went on to show results from an in-plant survey he conducted. Noting that sales per employee is not always an accurate indication of an in-plant’s performance, he separated respondents into “leaders” and “laggards” according to how well they are meeting their financial obligation to their parent organization while offering competitive pricing for commodity products.
Then he listed some of the traits of in-plant leaders:
- 40% are responsible for their organizations’ MFD fleets;
- 80% are insourcing print work;
- 90% have purchased variable data printing software;
- 60% have color management software;
- 80% use estimating software.
In each case, the laggards showed much lower adoption rates.
Bob has served as editor of In-plant Impressions since October of 1994. Prior to that he served for three years as managing editor of Printing Impressions, a commercial printing publication. Mr. Neubauer is very active in the U.S. in-plant industry. He attends all the major in-plant conferences and has visited more than 180 in-plant operations around the world. He has given presentations to numerous in-plant groups in the U.S., Canada and Australia, including the Association of College and University Printers and the In-plant Printing and Mailing Association. He also coordinates the annual In-Print contest, co-sponsored by IPMA and In-plant Impressions.
