The Blueprint

You Are Not Alone

In my recent travels I've come across several business owners who feel they are behind the times in improving their operational efficiency.  I'm sorry to say that it is more the norm than the exception.  Even some of the largest most progressive companies have yet to develop consistent document operational process.  Some have them but they sit on the shelf and are ignored.  They have become out of date in this digital fast changing world, or they were created and never really used.  I see so many opportunities to improve.  The companies that can streamline their operations and develop a core competency in measuring and improving their business will have a strong competitive advantage.

Starbucks and Customer Analytics

Anyone that frequents Starbucks (I'm sure there are still a few people out there who don't!) will notice that there is a major push to get people to register Starbucks cards.  I have to admit I use one and I'll get or give Starbucks card gifts.  Starbucks is offering free "add-on's" for people who register their card.

Why is Starbucks putting on such a push and why would they be willing to cut into their profits to do so?  Its the information.  I use the cards often, but because I haven't registered I'm anonymous to Starbucks.  When I register they have much more information about me and my habits.  Corporate data crunchers can use this data to better target their customers and also to analyze trends that could lead to greater operational efficiency.

A typical reprographer knows the volumes they run on equipment per month, the monthly sales and profit by office, and the sales by customer.  These trends are useful at a macro level, but if you can dive a couple layers deeper you may be surprised what you find.

Quality Accountability

In my previous post I talked about the impact quality was having on businesses.  A production manager recent told me they put incentives in place to reduce mistakes.  Employees were rewarded on a reduction in mistakes.  Something strange happened.  The mistakes increased.  Employees tried for a period of time to reduce the mistakes, but when they found they couldn't reduce the mistakes they lost their motivation.  The more upset management became with the mistakes the more the teams morale declined.  Obviously this was not the results they were looking for.

When this company took a deep look at what was really happening, they found the root problems were with the process not the people.  The work orders were confusing.  Often customers were not providing a clear description of what they wanted, and there were not documented procedures for delivering the work.  Because there were no documented procedures the training of new employees was ad-hoc and inconsistent between shifts and between locations.  New employees learned through osmosis and trial and error.

Before employees are held accountable to deliver quality work it must be made clear what the process is and who is held accountable for each step in the process.

Without Consistent Quality Nothing Else Matters

I've been working with some customers to find new and different ways to measure their business.  Some would call this business intelligence.  With the right tools to gather information and right analytical methods interesting trends can be tracked and key performance indicators (KPI's) developed to measure the pulse of your business.  These analytical tools can help you make more informed decisions to become more profitable, competitive and to weather the storm of the changes affecting the industry.

One thing that has caught me off guard is the impact that poor quality is having on reprographers businesses.  If you are loosing face with your customers because of poor quality there is nothing more important to measure.  This impacts your profitability.  It affects your ability to retain customers, and your ability to attract new customers.

Advances in design technology are only increase the probability of errors.  To get out of this vicious cycle companies must document their workflows, set up systems to track errors, engage employees to find the root cause of the errors, and make adjustments to the workflow to ensure these errors are eliminated or minimized in the future.

Getting Offices to Work Together

Most business owners are starting to realize the benefits of getting their locations to work together, but are finding challenges in implementing it.  I have personally seen companies with one production location working overtime and at maximum capacity while a nearby office is sitting idle.  There are many reasons for this: technology, internal procedures, and inertia.  I believe the primary contributor to this problem is performance measurement.  When managers of offices are brought together and their performance is compared their top line and bottom line results are presented.  Managers and whole offices are compared to their peers by the performance of their individual store.  Many will argue that they have plans where they give some credit for work that is shared, or some credit for the whole company.  This is better than not giving credit, but will not maximize cooperation between locations.  Most achievement oriented people will put their time and attention behind those things that they are measured on.  If you want to promote inter-office cooperation you need to look for different measurements.  Some in the industry are starting to figure this out with positive results.

Acceptable Service Levels

I had an interesting discussion with an IT director of a large reprographics firm.  He was complaining about the service levels of telecommunication firms.  He was saying the service level agreements (SLA's) commit to 99% uptime for network services.   When you look at the numbers that just not acceptable. If you assume 2,000 working hours in a year that means that you can be down for 2.5 days per year [2,000 * (1-.99) / 8 ] and still be within what they consider acceptable.  As your business transforms into a more IT centric business where interaction between offices, partners and customers is dependent on the network, 99% is just not good enough.  Those numbers also assume working hours.  One of the benefits of some of the Internet based technology is your customers can interact with your company in non-traditional working hours.  This means you could be "down" for much longer than 2.5 days.  The conclusion this IT director came to is he must take charge of the situation.  If 99% uptime is the best his vendors can provide then he needs to create his own back up plans because 99% isn't good enough for his business to operate and is certainly not acceptable to his customers.

One of Those Bad Days...

Sometimes when a day gets off to a bad start it is only the beginning. Apologies in advance for the language and infamous actor...you get the point.

IT Stockholm Syndrome

I wrote a previous post about Commercial Stockholm Syndrome where companies who are captured and treated bad by a vendor start to develop a loyalty to that vendor.  [Here is a link to an actual description of Stockholm Syndrome].

Over the last few years I have seen many cases of a similar phenomenon.  Business owners who believe that their IT staff is very good even though the IT problems that they are facing are often debilitating.  I had one reprographer tell me that his e-mail had been down for 3 days and he would occasionally receive e-mail that was addressed to other people in the company.  He then said, "but my It guys is working on it.  He's pretty good. [pause]  Well at least I think he is good."

I once had a boss who told me that when you are not educated on something and you hear someone else talking about it you assume they are really competent.  It is your lack of knowledge on the subject not their actual competence that creates the perception.

There are a lot of companies who have "homegrown" IT staff that face a multitude of IT problems that could be easily solved by a more competent IT employee.  This doesn't necessarily mean that the IT staff doesn't have the potential it may mean they have not received the appropriate training.  Competency can be hired or developed. 

Another thing to look at is certifications from an external source.  One example is a MCSE (Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer).

600 DPI Production Printing

The impact this can have on the industry is to make 400 DPI devices obsolete for many uses.  As architects embed more photographs, and create more detailed drawings the demand for high resolution printing increases.  There is another interesting phenomenon here.  Architects and engineers have been placing low volume 600 DPI devices in their locations and are becoming accustomed to the quality they get from these devices.  It will be hard for them to accept a lower quality print for production distribution.  We have seen this phenomenon in the past with the Oce 9800.

If you had multiple black and white TV's in your house and you bought one color TV, how long was it before the other black and white TV's were replaced. 

One reprographer told me I do not want to put a 600 DPI device in my production operation because my customers will like the quality so much I will have to replace all of my equipment with 600 DPI devices.  This will work if (1) your competition does not adopt 600 DPI, and (2) your customers do not have 600 DPI devices in their offices.  I believe both of these are unlikely.  This doesn't necessarily mean you must get rid of your 400 DPI devices.  As we all know, the contractors do not care if it is 600 DPI or 400 DPI, but this would mean you need a workflow to separate contractors work from architects. 

Scar Tissue

In a discussion about workflow and why employees perform certain tasks David Parkes, Director of Information Technology at Cushing, described certain processes as "scar tissue".  When you ask why somebody is performing a certain task or series of tasks the employee will often describe a problem they had in the past and how these tasks will avoid that problem in the future.  I have seen this first hand.  When talking with an employee who was preparing files to be imported into a plan room the employee described about 12 separate tasks that included renaming files, running files through different programs, and copying the files into multiple directories.  Many of these processes were put in place to allow an employee to "go back" to a previous "state".  If a customer complained about the quality of a file they could go back and find where in the process the problem occurred.  Although in isolation all of these processes made sense they were "scar tissue".  By mapping out the larger process flow and the problems that birthed these tasks a more streamlined workflow could be engineered with less steps and often a higher degree of accuracy.  This is often without implementing any new technology.  The key is digging into the root cause of why tasks are performed and then determining (1) if they need to be performed at all, or (2) if they should happen somewhere else in the workflow.