Managing by the Numbers
Successful or Just Surviving?
The problem with a lot of in-plants these days is that they don't know whether they're actually successful or simply surviving. They don't know what they're doing.
We led a workshop for college and university in-plant managers recently on managing for survival, and fewer than 10 percent of attendees could quantify the number of jobs in their shop, how many were late, break the amount of printing down to a few meaningful categories or provide even a rough estimate on the amount of work they did to support the major areas of the organization. Forget about cost data on a job-by-job basis. Their only measure of financial performance came at the end of the year when they closed their books, and folks, I'm here to tell you, that's too late.
Ray Chambers, CGCM, MBA, has invested over 30 years managing and directing printing plants, copy centers, mail centers and award-winning document management facilities in higher education and government.
Most recently, Chambers served as vice president and chief information officer at Juniata College. Chambers is currently a doctoral candidate studying Higher Education Administration at the Pennsylvania State University (PSU). His research interests include outsourcing in higher education and its impact on support services in higher education and managing support services. He also consults (Chambers Management Group) with leaders in both the public and private sectors to help them understand and improve in-plant printing and document services operations.
