30 Day Report Card

Filed Under Business Management

We’ve been on line for 30 days.  We’ve done okay, I think.  Here’s a progress report.

We have added a few registrants every day.  Since about 1/4 of the registrants have signed up anonymously, compiling decent demographics is not possible, nor will we divulge anyone’s name or any other data about members here.  I can tell you that the average level of registrant, when college students are taken out of the equation, is a Vice President or higher with a reputation, significant credentials, and usually amazing work behind them.  Some are in the publishing industry, some in the packaging industry, and some in the printing industry. 

We have few postings from this group, however, and that worries me because if the brain power of the people who have registered here were to be put together for good purposes, it would completely change the world.

We have tried to put some strategic alliances together to get more of the graphic arts food chain completed.  We have colleges and universities on board, we have some industry associations on board, and we are now going to begin talking to associations and groups that focus on the experienced white collar out-of-work crowd.  We’re going to advocate for everyone.  We want to have the best source of people in the US available for hiring managers in the graphic arts on Hireskills.com.  We’re using Hi-Res Kills as an outreach vehicle that entertains, educates, and innovates in the graphic arts.  It takes time and it takes money.  No one has done it before, but we’re doing it.  It’s only a matter of time before some camp follower comes along and tries to do the same thing.  In the meantime we’ll continue to work hard to bring you innovation.

We put an exclusive agreement together with Workblast.com.  They’re the first to put an online studio on your pc so you can generate your own video resume.  I believed when I started talking with Nick Murphy (Workblast’s CEO) and I still believe today, that video introduction to candidates will save graphic arts companies thousands of dollars each year.  An interesting aside - Nick went to ASU (played football there, too)- I went to USC.  Next Thursday night the two teams play and in all likelihood the loser will be out of BCS bowl contention.  Friends and allies business, enemies in football.  It’s all good!

We had a comment from a man who runs a premedia company for one of the largest corporations in the US - he has a WWW background and thought our name needed tweaking.  Hireskills.com he thought might be a wee bit ho-hum.  I agree, but we’ve been building this brand for 7 years and it’s not ready for a facelift.  We started this Hi-Res Skills blog/alternative hiring site with a name that was a play on words.  Turns out that omitting one little letter in the name gives us a totally different identity - so we changed the name yesterday to Hi-Res Kills.  We’ll see how that goes.  If you have opinions, let’s hear ‘em.  I’m opening my kimono for scores of readers, be honest - this is a blog for crying out loud!

And about crying out loud.  If you didn’t see me mention earlier that the collective brain power and experience of the people registered on this site could change the world, I’m doing it again.  The industry could use your thoughts and so could I.  My goal is for this company to be a significant agent of change in the graphic arts industry.  We have a small staff and I probably ought to sleep sometime.  Give me your thoughts!

We’re growing at a reasonable rate.  We’re bringing in people who have done amazing things in their lives, we’re on course to achieve the goals I’ve set for this organization. It’s not like Colonial House where I only had 6 weeks to make a 17th century colony successful on TV.  We have more time to do thoughtful things, plan and execute and consistently grow our constituency, technical offerings, and value to the industry.

We’ve had great discussion on the CPG side.  We are going to be adding a little bit more buzz every day.  There’s no People Magazine for the graphic arts industry - we may bring a little more interesting “what we just heard” kind of stuff to the site.

It has been an interesting first month.  I’ll report back on the 2nd month in Mid-December.

Thanks for being here!
MrHillEcoSkis

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The Ugly Truth

Filed Under Business Management

I was looking at the summaries of the resumes that came in to Hireskills.com yesterday and I was struck by the number of years of experience people registering with us had on that screen. I was looking at a table that contained the last 20 resumes we received. Adding up the years of experience that the resumes showed (keep in mind most people with significant managerial experience won’t put ALL the years they’ve worked for fear of never getting a job) and the total years was 577. Do the math. 577/20 = 28.85 years average experience.

I figured ‘this has got to be an anomaly’ so I pulled the last 100 resumes. Sure enough, there are college students looking for internships and some people who have worked 5 – 10 years and are out of a job, but the average over the 100 last resumes received is 19.56 years. Keep in mind we only deal with printing people. So the last 100 resumes we received for printing people with pressroom, prepress, CSR, plant management, sales and HR experience had an average of 19.56 years of experience. Hmm.

I considered the causes, talked with my co-workers about it – they’re all from the printing industry. The opinions were unanimous and not surprising: ‘Printers looking to lower operating costs dump the experienced people to hire entry level people who can be trained to do the same jobs, for a lot less money’.

So the ugly truth is that companies rewarded great people who came to work for them with ever increasing pay and benefits; people who worked hard for them, gave them great products to sell, and then just when they know everything about their business……they fire them.

Nice.

It says a lot about our industry, about our culture, about our managers. I could think of a thousand reasons why this is wrong. Here are a few:

(1) A person with 19.56 or 28.85 years of experience in printing has transitioned from analog to digital. They ushered in CTP. This is not trivial.
(2) If they were operational, they have fixed every press and piece of equipment known to the industry and their company.
(3) They know how to look at work and tell if it’s great or if it’s not.
(4) Customers love high quality, experienced vendors who get it right the first time.
(5) The odds are against you being able to bring in new people to work in a pressroom environment who are mechanically strong, with a great work ethic, who will stick around through washing blankets and loading paper until they learn more of the craft. If you can find that person you are about 90% luckier than the average bear.
(6) Sooner or later you run out of people to train your new people. Not only did you eat your seed corn, you killed your planters!

Our corporate mission is to help the industry attract and retain the finest people in the industry. As we have entered the market with Hi-Res Skills we have been focusing a lot lately on getting the food chain integrated on this site, so we’re tying in education for the ‘attract’ part of our mission.

We also need to be paying attention to the ‘retain’ portion of our mission. I won’t belabor the point, but if you are a hiring manager reading this, consider what you stand to gain from hiring an experienced person who has fought the wars.

1) A person who has weathered the storms of the industry for the past 19.56 or 28.85 years has lost their share of battles. This is critical – they know what NOT to do. People who are new to the industry from college know what they SHOULD do, but they are without the experience to understand, much less intuit, the costs of what they SHOULD NOT do.
2) A person with 19.56 or 28.85 years of experience has more time to work. Their kids are probably grown and out of the home.
3) A person with 19.56 or 28.85 years of experience knows the players in the market, knows the competitors, knows their equipment, knows their salespeople, probably knows their strengths and weaknesses and can help propose work that will be innovative and end up in a sale.
4) A person with 19.56 or 28.85 years of experience has, in all likelihood, a better understanding of how to work smarter than an entry level person. Your entry level person may work hard, but with few exceptions it takes years to learn how to work smart.

So what does a corporation do with a Pressroom Supervisor who is making $70,000 a year when they can fleet up their assistant for $40K, hire an entry level person for $20K and add $10K to the bottom line?

What does a newly hired GM do with the Pressman who has worked for 25 years for a company and had consistently delivered incredible work and received pay raise after pay raise only to be one of the highest paid people in operations?

I know! Let him go! We can find a dozen people with good enough skill to take his place.

Know what? We know the other ugly truth. No, you can not find a dozen people to do his job. Not with his or her eye for color, composition and fidelity! Not with the same efficiency! Not with the same dedication to the company!

Oh, and that eye? Not easy to find.

So what does the industry do? How can we endure more of the same blather every year where industry managers complain we can’t find good people for the graphic arts.

WAKE UP! You had them, you’re just getting rid of them!

MrHillEcoSkis

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Okay Mavens, Sharpen Your Pens. The Debate Continues - M&A vs. Focusing on Graphics Efficiencies

Filed Under Business Management

Mercurius Wotan posted on October 16th and the opinions were scant at the time-  But yesterday some fur started flying and continues this morning.  Look below at the posting entitled Obsessive Focus on…? …..the comment posted last night by Automation 12345 seems to be a complete rebuttal of Mercurius’ assertions, justification for Southern’s business practices and is worthy of your attention.    Folks?  This debate is not going away. Mercurius Wotan parries this morning in response to Hardone.  It gets more and more fascinating as Schawk reports 2.9% drop.  Weigh in!   You can read it all by following this thread.

MrHillEcoSkis

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What is the Coolest Printing Company in the US?

Filed Under Business Management

What printing company do you think is the coolest company out there? Why?
Which ones do you think are the least cool? Why?
WE WANT TO KNOW!!!
Every year PIA/GATF announces their Best Workplace program winners.  Awards are given for small (less than 100 employees), medium (101-250 employees) and large companies (250+ employees, multi-plant).  They award a Best of the Best and they award Best Workplace categories. Last year 36 companies earned Best Workplace honors and 19 received Best of the Best designation.
The program features an analysis of companies by experienced HR people in terms of management practices, work environment, training and development programs, recognition and award programs, workplace health and safety, health and well being programs, financial security and work-life balance.
Truly these awards highlight very good companies.  The awards also serve as marketing tools for sales organizations, and a few winners even post their awards on their career pages so that job hunters can see the awards, because the awards say a lot about the companies who win them. 
I have been thinking about these awards recently, and wondering if they matter to a person who is out of work.  I’ve been a manager for many years and one thing I know about a person living in Wisconsin who is out of work:  their first attempts to get a job are going to be with Wisconsin printers, not just the Best of the Best ones (though Wisconsin print professionals have a bunch from which to chose– three Best of the Best: Visual Systems, McNaughton & Gunn, and Ripon Community Printers; and seven of the Best Workplace companies: Action Printing, Crescent Printing, Resco Print Graphics, Tailored Label Products, Suttle-Straus, CL&D Graphics and Times Printing).
So I got to thinking about these awards and to whom these designations matter. For some people the designation is important, for others, not so much. They matter to the management and are a source of pride for existing employees and employees past.  But on the whole they are not a major sorting function for future employees.  They could be – but that would require major marketing of the companies to college students and to the people on the presses and the people running CS3 or InDesign or PSI at other companies, and to the people who are out of work but have great skills and capabilities.  Presently there’s not a heck of a lot marketing of the award winners that meets the eye of job seekers – so from the Hireskills.com mission standpoint (to help attract and retain the best talent available for the graphic arts) the awards aren’t that useful. 
Who are these future employees, and what designation would matter to students in their final year of graphic communications programs at our colleges and universities?  And what designation would resonate with people currently working at companies’ not so employee friendly? And what designation would be consistent with Hireskills’ mission of attracting and retaining the best talent available for our industry?
And we decided that The Coolest Printing Company in the United States was a reasonable designation; one that would excite graphic arts students and get the attention of employees who have been whipped by their bosses for years.  We’re evolving the hiring process here – and before too long we’ll have a bunch of students in our Draft Choices section, a bushel of Free Agents, video resumes that change the hiring model, and we’re going to market the companies that win and come in as runners up in The Coolest competition so every job seeker that logs into Hireskills.com and Hi-Res Skills sees them and is made aware of them.  If those companies are Hireskills.com subscribers, we’ll have the listing of jobs available with full blown descriptions, and more information about those companies and the jobs themselves than any other job site in our industry.
HR committee analysis of companies is important, to be sure, but if you look at how some of the Best of the Best evaluate themselves you’ll see where the gold is buried.  They rely on the input of their employees.  This is a critical activity undertaken by enlightened managers who know that happy people work harder, and that happy workers are a signal that they as managers are doing good things.  We have happy people visiting our site and out of work, not-so-happy people visiting our site, too. All of them need to know who the coolest companies in printing are. We are calling thousands of companies to ask them if they are interested in nominating their companies for the first Coolest award.  We’re not going to skew the award by citing evaluation criteria - what a California company does to attract and retain employees may be different from a Florida company, but they may achieve the same end.  But we will listen and weigh the inputs of employees heavily so employees - log in, comment for us -  if you’re not sure your company will respond, or if you think they should or shouldn’t – please drop me an email or comment to this posting.  We need all the input we can get from the people in the trenches.
If you love your company– let us know.  If you don’t love your company, let us know.  We won’t share any information except who the winners are, and information is streaming in from companies, but employee input will tell us where unhappy workers are and aren’t.  That’s important data for us as enlightened people who seek to help the industry prosper and grow.
Thanks!
MrHillEcoSkis
 

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Obsessive Focus On …? (posted for Scuttlebutt but too interesting to leave off the front page)

Filed Under Brand Management, Business Management, Lean Business

Over the last few months a number or rumors have circulated concerning possible M&A activity concerning market leaders in packaging graphics services, Southern Graphic Systems and Schawk, inc.  Among these have been reports that Southern’s CEO has declared an intent to sell Southern to Schawk, in multiple mixed forums.

Southern has struggled to meet its EBITA targets and is reported to currently be $4 million short of target.  In an effort to improve this condition numerous layoffs and other forms of contraction have been reported in recent months.  Among these have been the laying off of a number of key sales people, the closing of plants and the elimination of all but one member of its original Lean Business Solutions group, which provided graphics process improvements for prospects and customers and facilitated numerous new account acquisitions.

According to a recent letter from southern’s CEO “We met our commitment to our stake-holders in Q1 but experienced negative organic growth in Q2. The shrinking of our core business had a material impact on our margins. I want to ask everyone especially our commercial group to renew our commitments to organic growth”.

M&A has been a significant factor in business growth for both of these companies, as well as for a number of other companies competing in this space.  As acquisitions have taken place little has apparently been done to consolidate plant, integrate cultures or establish equipment and work method standards that would improve operations in terms of product quality, efficiency and margins.

To be sure, such efficiency measures are significantly more difficult than what is required to acquire another company and the fiscal rewards to management isn’t anywhere near as lucrative.  Although such incentives have driven consolidation in many other sectors of the graphic arts industry, operational efficiency continues to be overlooked, or at least, is given less attention. 

The current acquisitions favored incentive systems carry with them serious consequences that, left unchecked, could constitute a notable risk to companies who maintain such a focus.  Customers in all sectors continue to escalate implementation of purchasing practices that render graphics services as a commodity.  As a result, margins for many who compete in these sectors are shrinking as pricing pressures mount.

Beyond this, companies that favor acquisition strategies over improvements to operations are creating a market gap relative to customer relations and competitiveness that provides incentive for competitors who make operational improvement a top priority.  In the packaging sector the incentive to fill this market gap will, in time, be seen as very strong.

Given the $2.1 trillion annual revenues in the consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry and the percentage of annual revenues these companies spend on packaging graphics, the financial potential in the packaging sector is staggering.  Add to this that electronic forms of publishing are at least decades away from displacing print and it’s easy to see that even a fraction of a percent of market share in packaging is compellingly attractive. 

There’s real gold in focusing of graphics process improvement, both for service provider operations and as a service to CPG customers.  Expediting time to market, lowering costs and increasing quality are vital to service providers and CPGs alike and the service provider who focuses on such objectives are able to kill two birds (increased margins and competitive advantage) with a single stone.  Neglecting process efficiency, on the other hand, can result in two stones that are equally capable of killing the service provider who places more focus on M&A strategies than on improvement.

Virtually all service providers assert that they are focused on customer satisfaction and some even assert that this focus is an obsession.  This looks good when displayed on a placard in corporate and plant lobbies and sounds good when making new business pitches, but rarely is backed up with boardroom or HR incentives that truly reward customer service over new business and M&A acquisitions.

Many would agree that CPG companies, as well as customers for other segments of the graphics industry are principally focused optimizing the value they receive in terms of their criteria for quality, turnaround time and cost.  Process performance improvement, when correctly addressed, improves all three criteria.  M&A activities, however, address none of these customer value criteria, at least not in a positive way.  

The histories of a number of companies merging with or acquiring other companies typically encounter problems attributable to variance in equipment, work methods and business cultures between the entities involved that frequently compromise the quality, turnaround time and cost provided to customers.

Boardroom and HR incentive systems need to recognize what they are “incentiveizing” and address the fact that if customer needs are not a first priority foundation for the service provider, the service provider will ultimately find themselves in last place in the market - or worse.

Mercurius Wotan

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Organizational structure and implementation of technology

Filed Under Brand Management, Business Management, Lean Business, Publishing Processes

Organizational Structure

We have been implementing technology at our company at a fast and furious pace. This is in large part due to several well educated points of view. In order to become and remain a modern publishing company, we need a modern publishing platform. There will be numerous internal efficiencies to be gained which will allow head count reductions and thus operational cost control. Integrating disparate platforms will create automation capabilities which we can leverage into our processes in order to reduce cycle time, eliminate error through re-keying of data, and reduce costs through effective internal processes and supply chain management. All of these points of view are true in my opinion and it’s part of my job to figure out how to achieve these goals quickly, while controlling costs.

Our organization is made up of nearly 80 individual businesses or brands, which are grouped together based on the markets they serve. I manage a centralized group of services allocated to the businesses we support. Our employee population is nearly 200 people. These services include print production management, prepress, art direction and creative services, distribution and mail, web operations and production, eNewsletter deployment, order entry, print and paper procurement and so on.

Prior to our re-organization, these people were in large part, serving the individual brands in some form or another for some time. Some were associated to particular brands, others were associated to numerous ones. Some were geographically strategically located, others worked remotely, and NONE of them did the same things the same way, with the same tools. Our company began to realize that they were not in control of their labor cost base (the single biggest expense) and had no method by which to evaluate the fair and equitable distribution of costs and the talent we employed. We were in need of a method by which to audit the talent pool and determine a path toward re-structure and optimization. Following is a description of what we did.

The first step was to attempt to identify all support personnel by job descriptions, categorizations in our HR systems, associations to brands and managers and allocated costs and FTE’s. As we began to do that, we realized that everything was all over the map. There was no consistency to structure and we were having trouble identifying everyone that we felt we needed to. After several attempts to do this, we began to realize that we needed to categorize roles in order to identify what and who was in scope, and to create bucket’s of known costs. Our exercise is specific to our organization, but can be adapted to various structures. We began at a high level with two simple buckets; Brand Development and Brand Support.

As we performed analysis of personnel associated to each brand, we categorized them in either of these two areas. Those that actually created the editorial message, sold that message, created content and participated in the market which those brands supported were categorized as Brand Developers. Examples of these are Publishers, Managing Editors, Editors in Chief, Sales and Marketing staff etc. Those that provided services in support of the brands, more of a generic nature that weren’t particularly necessarily associated to the brand itself or it’s marketplace were categorized as Brand Support. Examples of these are production managers, order entry staff, art directors, paginators, prepress operators, purchasing agents etc.

As we moved forward with this exercise, we began to realize there was actually a 3rd category, Market Brand Support. These are individuals that need knowledge of the brand and it’s marketplace in order to perform their duties, but that provided reasonably generic services. Examples of these are Copy Editors, Web Managers and Client Service Representatives.

Once we had these categorizations and understood them completely, we embarked upon the exercise of attaching everyone who’s job role was deemed to be in scope of the project to one of the three. We then created a schedule through which we identified the labor costs and fringe in each of the three.

We then focused our attention specifically on the Brand Support bucket and began to re-organize the roles within, creating centralized departments and groups of people with like responsibilities. We put all of the art directors in one market group into one department and nominated a working manager from within that group. We did the same for the 6 or 7 main roles that we had identified through normalization of job descriptions (with lots of assumptions). This then gave us a sense of organizational structure and identification of costs. The premise of this reorganization was to leverage control on best practices and execution of job responsibilities, to aggregate optimized labor against the work at hand and identify all “administrative” functions that the incumbents were performing that significantly detracted from leveraging their expertise and skills in direct support of revenue. It also created an environment supportive of promotion and managerial responsibility and created a structure that could be managed.

As we began to pull of this together, we were also identifying the electronic software systems that each group used and how. We quickly got to a total count of 80 core systems used in one capacity or another by roles attached to the Brand Support bucket alone. These ranged from databases, to graphics applications to workflow governance and content management systems. This quickly led us to the premise that many of these systems were duplicated and could be either eliminated or standardized into a smaller group, and many of these should be exchanging information electronically, which they were not. It also let to the premise that a completely integrated platform of technology would become a launching pad for optimized processes and cost reductions. At the same time, we were in the process of analyzing what technologies would be necessary to implement in order to create a modern publishing platform to support revenue generation and support.

As these two technology initiatives converged, and we reviewed them in context with our organizational re-structure, it became abundantly clear which technologies should be eliminated and replaced or upgraded, which technologies needed to “talk” to one another, and what were the missing pieces required to complete the end to end solution we were looking for. Additionally, it became very clear how to go about the process of the change management required in order achieve all of our goals. Once we had identified the entire solution, we leveraged a small but specialized team of subject matter experts to train our centralized Brand Support teams in the overall schema of our program and in the specifics of the use of the platform. This way we gained consistent adoption of the capabilities, support for the organization through cross training and support, and developed best practices for the use of technology. The result was that we were able to convert nearly 500 users of Adobe software in 6 different locations supporting 80 brands in just under 1 year. That progress continues, as we roll out wave after wave of new and refined technology to the brands. We’ve developed a consistent approach, leveraging our ubiquitous involvement and support, and we’ve actually been able to accelerate our implementation program as the processes are clearly established.

Standardized roles, categorized job functions, known responsibilities and organizational structure not only provided a roadmap through which we could implement technology quickly, but also control our labor costs as we did so.

John Blanchard 

VP Manufacturing,

Reed Business Information

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