Knowledge From Numbers?And People

Planning comes from people, not spreadsheets. Here's one manager's take on how human interaction can be more important than fancy figures.

In the back of one of my file cabinets is a stack of documents. Every now and again, as the need arises, one or more of these volumes is pulled out, dusted off, and a number, an observation, or some factoid is pulled out for inclusion in some new report I am working on.

What are these works? There's a couple of consultant reports, two major internal task force self studies—one with a rebuttal written by the previous management—a handful of business plans for new equipment acquisition and a half dozen other miscellaneous reports on this or that aspect of the department. The documents represent thousands of hours of work by dozens of people over the past dozen or so years. All in all, the pile of documents is about nine inches tall.

While the books' service as a reference source is invaluable, they have another, even better use that I occasionally put them to: dropping this stack of work on a table or desk and remarking,"Haven't we studied this issue to death?" makes a bold and dramatic statement.

This is not, I'll admit, an original tactic. Seems to me that some years ago there was a congressional inquiry on simplifying the tax code. Some bright staffer suggested that they display a copy of the entire federal tax code so that the good congressmen and women could see for themselves the size of the dragon they were dealing with. If I recall correctly, at some point during the hearings the table groaned, then crashed as it collapsed under the weight of the documents. I don't recall if it was discussed at that time whether the table had been sabotaged; it was a simpler, more trusting, time then.

However, if some staffer did indeed undermine the structural integrity of the table, he or she should get a medal for ingenuity in making a dramatic, if wordless, statement. Sadly, not even the destruction of this piece of federally owned furniture was impetus enough for the esteemed legislature to take any real action toward tax code simplification. But, the statement was made.

My point here is that as print managers, we can spend too much time studying the numbers behind the issues we face, and not enough time actually facing the problems. I am not arguing for the elimination of record keeping or self-study. I am not saying that introspection or looking at the perils and opportunities ahead is unhealthy.

Our knowledge of past numbers is helpful as we look to our future. They form the foundation for our planning. But the actual plan has to be built from the informed opinions of ourselves, our workers, our industry and most of all, our customers.

The fact is, there are hundreds of numbers that an in-plant manager could keep track of, from the basic issues like total sales and expenses on up to obscure ratios that would do an M.B.A. proud. The trade organizations release enough data each year to keep a resident statistician busy in each of our shops from dawn till dark. Very few of us have the resources for that, so it normally falls on the in-plant manager to determine for his or her shop which are the key numbers that matter.

But before you decide what is important, you need to know what resources are available. There are plenty of tools out there. Printing Industries of America and many of the regional printers' organizations put together annual studies about operating ratios. The National Association of Quick Printers and others do pricing surveys. These studies don't come cheaply, and they carry with them reams of extra data that is simply not applicable to our in-plant situations. A lot of times it is less costly to attend a seminar about the study than to buy the actual study.

Another set of resources that in-plant managers sometimes fail to make use of is their organization's own finance people. They can usually get you access to tons of transaction data, which can be combined with the print shop's own data to arrive at some very interesting numbers.

For example, we all know our annual sales volume. It's a number we either brag about daily or hide under a basket. But how many of us know our market share? Not too many, I'd bet. And isn't market share really more important than sales volume when looking at an in-plant's value to its parent organization, and its potential for growth?

A friend from your general accounting division or budget office can very often (and usually very easily) determine the total outlay or expenditure for printing by the unit. It's very easy then to divide your sales by the total printing expense to get the market share.

Strategic planning is currently a hot topic in my organization. I've been tasked with developing a mid- to long-range plan for the print shop. I've read that one of the central concepts of strategic planning is that forecasting is difficult-to-impossible for any industry that is undergoing major change. Printing—or maybe we should call it imaging now—is in the midst of its most fundamental paradigm shift since old man Gutenberg slapped ink on type.

For a time, that scared me about making any solid predictions about the future of our print shop. But then I realized that the plan I needed to develop wasn't going to be as much about "services" as it was about "service." No manager can predict what new marvels will roll out of the factories of Rochester, southern California, Germany or Japan. We cannot foresee what snazzy leap forward in C-code or PostScript is going to improve our lives by covering the shortcomings of our customers' files.

What we can and must do is plan for two things. First, we must accept the risk and embrace change in our processes. We do not need to know exactly which machines we will be running. We do need to know what general kinds of products we will offer our customers. We need to listen to our customers about where they are headed, what they will need, and what their constraints are for the future.

If our customers say "color," strategic planning does not require me to decide today whether I should acquire a Tektronix printer or a Heidelberg GTO-DI. A good and conscientious plan will orient the department toward learning and then monitoring what the customer means when she says "color," and what options are or will be available. How are we going to answer this need at minimal risk with maximum potential benefit to the customer, the shop and our shared organization? Only our customers can tell us that.

The second area that can be successfully planned is service. All of our mission statements have us "striving to be a world-class provider" of this and that or whatever we do. What varies is how our organization should achieve that status, and how we can get there. For some shops, it might be additional customer service representatives. For others, responsiveness to their organizations' timeliness needs might be an issue. Partnering with customers might be the goal in some shops. These are mostly issues of the organizational culture to be worked out between our customers and ourselves.

Both these require spending more time with people and less time with spreadsheets. Our customers and staffs have the answers to these questions. They are not to be found in some mythical Lotus 123 formula.

I knew a print manager who spent his days writing numbers in notebooks. He could tell you the day-by-day history of the price of bond paper. I'd look at his row of binders and ask, "What does it all mean? What are they telling you?" He really didn't know—or, as Neil Young put it,"The numbers add up to nothing." Guess what? He's no longer managing a print shop.

That stack of dusty reports in my files does indeed serve a purpose. But as I look to the future, I can learn much more by listening to my customers than from any task force report or consultant's study. What I'd really like to do with those studies is...well, how about we bronze them and use them for a doorstop? IPG

That stack of dusty reports in my files does indeed serve a purpose. But as I look to the future, I can learn much more by listening to my customers than from any task force report or consultant's study.

Stephen Chant is the manager of University Graphics & Printing at the University of Vermont. You can contact him at (802) 656-2960 or at: schant@moose.uvm.edu

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