That standard phrase defining insanity: trying to do the same thing and expecting different results . . . In October of this year, we added The Waterloo Courier as a commercial customer. The process of assimilating another newspaper has been both challenging and rewarding. The most recent challenge has been assimilating holiday production for two newspapers. We are getting through the peak of demand on our production systems, while we realized that we must do things differently we’re still discovering and adjusting. The positive aspect has been a change in our ability to be flexible and adaptive, but this has also illustrated the need to work to clearer goals to the front line staff. Rather than assigning work, we need to engage all staff in the process of understanding the overall goals, proirities and product tolerances for each customer and establish boundaries on what decisions the front line staff can make and the impact of those decisions.
We are in the beginning stages of implementing Prism’s MIS system, which will link into our key production systems and link our staff to production goals for each job. This will be a significant tool, but in the meantime our goal is to increase decision making by the front line staff and change the current environment of managers feeding decisions to supervisors and staff. Managers are currently spending more time on the production floor walking through all processes with the staff and identifying areas where staff do not have enough information to make effective decisions. Our staff shows a strong willingness to engage in this process, the biggest challenge is trying to keep managers focused on training staff and clarifying expectations of staff while also engaging in changing processes to adapt to the significant change in work flow.
Human nature being what it is, when the stakes are high most prefer to operate in an environment where risk is mitigated. As a business we need to get our arms around producing multiple daily publications in a cost effective manner, meeting deadline and quality expectations with a much higher degree of flexibility. That means being a more transparent and collaborative with our customers on our processes, understand their goals and priorities even better and offering clearer quantification of the abililties of our systems and processes.
There is no doubt that we value the added business and that this type of business aligns with our core values, newspapers are relevant to a community. While newspapers must change how they do business the printed newspaper still is a viable and necessary component of providing service to a community. We as the printer and packager of newspapers have to do business differently to support the emerging needs of our customers and the new business models our customers will be adapting.
