Bindery community puts it forward: R&E Council meetings attracted quite a crowd, possibly hinting at either an improving economy or a worsening environment in which businesses need help. Bindery leaders shared some success secrets, from pricing to damage recovery to postal health

Print Action, May 2003 by Mason, Dennis

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With attendance up a healthy 17 per cent over the 2002 meeting, a welcome sign of recovery in the printing industry may have been seen last month at the 2003 Bindery, Finishing and Distribution Seminar in Chicago. Sponsored by the R&E Council of NAPL, this 45th annual meeting in the series attracted some 200 people from Canada and the U.S., as well as Germany, Italy and the Netherlands. While attendance still fell short of the 300 seen at mid-1990s R&E Council bindery seminars, the upturn from 2002 may well indicate that the industry is beginning to turn in a positive direction.

Critical trends facing the bindery was the subject of the keynote address by Peter Hanson, president of the Banta Corporation Publications Group. Hanson began his talk by noting that more price competition and diminished capital expenditures are the inevitable results of the current economic situation. To remain healthy, Hanson said, print must collaborate, innovate and communicate. Collaboration means that printers and their customers mutually determine what each can do best. From there, Hanson says, it is essential that printers keep communicating directly with those customers to determine how to improve what they do best. Follow-up by both the customer and the printer is necessary.

Raised on the Web

Hanson observed that consumers and businesses today are bombarded with messages, as marketers use a broad array of media to get their point across. Current customers have been raised on television and the internet, and print must learn to effectively compete for their attention with these other mediums. Print is only one of the mediums available to publishers and advertisers and remaining competitive with other media is critical to the long-term success of print, he said.

Moving to a discussion of trends in the industry, Hanson noted that shorter runs and targeting are the result of content creators attempting to address an ever more specific audience. Rising postal costs mean that print and the postal services are inextricably tied, he said. Both the U.S. Postal Service and Canada Post must provide universal service while facing distribution costs that often are fixed, and Hanson noted that maintaining the health of the postal services is essential, since everyone has a postal address, but not everyone has a digital address or is willing to disclose it. This fact gives print an edge over digital media.

Discussing automation in the bindery, Hanson said that it is important to improve productivity through consistency, to monitor and reduce costs, and to reduce labour wherever possible. Reducing labour improves consistency in a print-industry sector that is plagued by high turnover. Hanson also discussed cycle time as a critical factor for the print industry.

For example, in anticipation of the recent military activities in Iraq, many advertisers withheld print advertisements because of economic uncertainty. With digital media, however, it was not necessary to take such a defensive posture.

Discussing consolidation in the print industry, Hanson observed that vendors, print customers and printers all continue to be reduced in number. Noting that in 2001, two of the top five Banta customers underwent consolidation, Hanson told the audience that the current environment necessitates constant communication with customers. He predicted, however, that the print market has bottomed out, and that the future will look better.

Concluding his discussion of industry trends, Hanson said that an extended value chain is necessary in the market today, which means that print providers must furnish more services and products, and must enable customers to focus on a single-source provider. He predicted that printers will find it necessary to do more and more for fewer and fewer customers. Hanson predicted that print will continue to grow - albeit at a slower rate - because it is still the best way to communicate.

Protecting 50-million pounds of paper

Disaster recovery was the subject of a presentation by Frank Arndorfer, vice president of operations for Quad/Graphics. Arndorfer described how Quad/Graphics dealt with the destruction by fire in July 2002 of a new automated storage facility in Lomira, Wisconsin. When the building collapsed - in only 34 seconds - the structure held 50-million pounds of printed product and raw materials. The resulting fire burned for 16 days, and some 16 local fire departments pumped an estimated 23-million gallons of water on the site.

Describing the disruption to Quad/Graphics business as a result of the incident, Arndorfer advised the audience to prepare for such an eventuality by preparing a detailed disaster plan. How employee evacuation, safety and assistance is to occur in case of a disaster, he said, should be part of the plan, which should be clearly posted and widely understood. It is especially important to make such plans available in understandable terms to those employees who may not speak the primary language used in the plant. Also critical is to identify a reassembly area, so that all employees can be accounted for quickly and accurately.