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Thoughts on Corporate America vs. Private Enterprise.
For some 50 years I owned and operated a small to medium size commercial printing company, published a regional trade journal for the printing industry, was a consultant to small and medium size print shops, and was the international source of where to find products and services and how to produce difficult jobs. In the mid 1990's I decided it was time to retire, so I sold the shop. After 15 years I got tired of sitting home and started looking for a part-time job. 2009 was not the best time to go job hunting, but I was fortunate and got numerous offers - problem was that most offers were all full-time and all required me to move from Lufkin. That wasn't going to happen.
By chance, an opening came up at our local Office Depot (OD) in their Print and Copy Center - a perfect fit for me because they hire only part-time associates and I could stay involved in the printing industry.
The managers and other associates are great to work with. OD's policy of greeting customers is the best I have seen in any business. I did not care about the money, so I immediately accepted the near minimum-wage position. They are totally dedicated to the customer. However there are some major differences - some I am still having a problem of dealing with after working there for a year.
Having over 20 years experience as a highly paid consultant to small and medium size print shops in the area of maximizing profits and customer service, were our OD Print and Copy (P&C) center a privately owned shop, it would be the epitome of a shop that was in deep trouble and needed help. However, corporate shows our P&C the most profitable department in the store. That took some research.
Turns out that corporate does not consider the most expensive cost in a P&C - labor - as a cost. Their philosophy is that the associate is there anyway - so that cost is not attributed to the individual jobs.
Also, there is no one in the corporate chain - from the P&C manager through the CEO of the company who apparently has any experience in "manufacturing." No one understands there is a vast difference between manufacturing and retail sales. All are experts in "marketing."
In the retail store, customers come in to buy items that were manufactured by someone else, shipped to the store in bulk, put on the shelves for associates in those departments to sell, and management encourages those associates to upgrade the sale.
In the P&C, our customers look at us as a destination point. They come specifically to have us "manufacture" something for them. Whether it is a single photocopy, a typesetting job, a business card, or one hundred copies of a 250-page cookbook, each job is unique (except in the case where that customer has us repeat the job.)
Many customers are more observant than is local management or corporate in that they recognize how inefficient our operation is.
Corporate and management looks at P&C like any other department in the store. Our equipment must be lined up in the manner that corporate has dictated - against a wall, closely placed side-by-side, with no working area, and where the associate working on that piece of equipment has his or her back to the customer counter.
There are no work tables, because "they do not look attractive to the customer." The unintended consequences of this are that we often must use a knife to trim a printed or laminated document. With no work table, that trimming must be done on one of the customer counters and the knife makes unattractive scores in the surface of the counter.
Some tools that are necessary to the printer are frowned upon because they are "dangerous." Mat knives with no point are useless to a printer. A bodkin or awl is a necessary pointed tool. A trimmer that doesn't have some kind of protective device is banned and not replaced. Rulers that the scale does not start at the end of the rule are difficult to use (we need to use a pica pole). Equipment used in the manufacturing business may be dangerous, but in my 50 years experience, any of the very few injuries I have seen were caused by user error and not equipment failure. Associates have the responsibility to use care when operating any of this equipment.
Our self-service printers are located outside of the counters surrounding the P&C. We have a large display of various colors and weights of paper which the customer may select from. Problem is that our price on that stock ranges from $.02 per sheet to $.10 per sheet and we never get paid for it. That display should be inside the P&C and the customer needs to request however many sheets they require.
Most important is that corporate does not understand that it is never appropriate to have the production area visible to the customer.
Our corporate provided job ticket is one of the worst designed job tickets I have ever seen. It is 4-pages, incomplete, missing SKUs, in no reasonable order, and full of unnecessary drivel. Everything required could be easily compiled on one page with the back side compiling two other order forms - eliminating two order forms.
Orders should be produced on a first-in, first-out basis most of the time. While we have a place on the top of the job ticket for the date and time a job came in, it is rarely filled in by the associate who took it. Even if it were, when an associate is looking for the next job to produce, he or she would have to look through all of the job tickets on the job table to find the next one. A simple queue list with the customer's name and brief description of the job to be filled out when the job ticket was written up and when it was due out would take care of this situation in need of a solution.
We have a place for completed jobs, but there is no organization. It is a few cubby holes under the customer counter. Time is wasted looking through all of the cubby holes for the job. They need to be organized alphabetically or have a job rack like most pharmacies have where ready-to-pick-up items are in large plastic holders in alphabetical order.
Replacement of equipment that is at the end of it's life should be immediate, rather than waiting months for replacement approval. A case in point is that one of the most profitable pieces of equipment was our punch and binding machine. The frame broke on that and the technician said it had to be replaced. A competent manager would have had the replacement shipped next day air, but after several months, corporate has not authorized the purchase. The individual responsible for holding up that replacement needs to be relieved of any decision making responsibility.
There needs to be a better method of ordering necessary supplies and we need to constantly monitor supply inventory to make certain we have back-up, and immediately order necessary supplies. Often we run out of supplies before an order is placed.
There will never be a job come into the P&C that we cannot handle. The problem is that only certain types of jobs are authorized, our production facility does not have the capability or authority to produce everything a customer may require, and the individual P&C associates do not have the authority to order these items or services from an area trade service.
We could substantially increase our profits if associates were able to outsource some items that corporate cannot provide. Problem there is that rarely does OD hire associates experienced in the printing industry and it would be a disaster to allow inexperienced associates to outsource jobs at their digression.
OD needs to look at FedEx/Kinko philosophy. There is a corporate manager of the Kinko division who has vast experience in the management and operation of a small to medium size P&C. OD needs such an individual who understands the manufacturing process and whose sole responsibility is to assure the efficient operation of all P&Cs. Such an individual could vastly improve our profit picture.
Often experienced associates have personal software that would enable the production of a job much more efficiently or in come cases simply produce the job (such as OCR software) Even though a customer may authorize their job to be produced office, it is OD's philosophy not to do so. If the associate agrees to do so and if the customer has no problem with the job being produced off site, this should be authorized. However to do so results in immediate termination.
Professional printers who happen to be associates want to do everything possible to give the customer what he requires. Occasionally that associate (printer) wants to come in and produce the job on his/her own time, off the clock, but that is rarely authorized. Local management should have some flexibility in this area. Management does not seem to realize that often the associate is more interested in the job rather than the compensation.
Our local OD P&C is pretty much a clone of my old shop except I had small offset capability, more appropriate bindery equipment, and more appropriate software. I also was able to easily outsource anything I did not have the capability of producing. My volume was about the same as ours ($250M to $500M per year) with a customer base of about 950+ small customers and a half dozen or so larger customers. I had four full-time employees paid between $10 and $18 per hour, two part-time employees paid $10 and $24, myself full time and my bride part-time. We consistently took home between $125,000 and $150,000 per year. or about $10,000 to $12,000 per month. Many of my old customers cannot understand why I cannot produce their job the way I use to do it.
Bottom line is that management is afraid to offend anyone up the chain and those up the chain have no idea of how the manufacturing process works. The inefficiency perpetuates itself. P&C managers were once P&C associates. They had no experience in the printing environment so they had no idea how a shop should be run. As they progress up the chain of command new associates do not have the proper training. This is repeated over and over again. Associates become so indoctrinated in operating inefficiently that they do not realize how inefficient they are and do not complain up the chain of command. As long as pencil pushers and marketers are given the "busy work" to come up with useless forms, inefficient shop layout, and regulations that substantially curtail profit, corporate will never know just how profitable their P&Cs could be.
This is the first time in my working career, other than the time I was in the US Army, that I have had a "job." I've always owned my company, so parts of this new job were a real shock. I spoke with a number of friends and past associates who had worked in both the corporate and private environment in various industries and they told me I hit the nail on the head - "that's the way it is." Do it their way and don't worry about it. That was excellent advice.
Now the good/bad news. After about 15 months of putting up with the pleasure of working with old customers, meeting new customers, playing around with the equipment, I was terminated. Fired from my first job. How about that? One of my loyal old customers came in with a job and she wanted it typeset using a typestyle I had used some of her work years ago. We did not have that font, so she asked if I could do it at home and she would pay me. I told her I would be happy to do it at home, but OD would have to be paid for that work. A manager found out about it, reported me to corporate HR, and HR asked that I be terminated. The upside is that the $300 I made every two weeks was not really needed and can be easily replaced; I can spend more time working on my home business which is far more profitable; and I can still keep my finger in the printing business by accepting typesetting and printing jobs that would have been unethical while working for another print shop. The downside is that I will really miss visiting with the customers since I do not have a walk-in shop.
The upside is that from my home office I have started doing a little printing for my old customers. On the actual printing, using Office Depot's pricing, my profits are greater than when I had my own shop. On the typesetting and artwork I am substantially higher, but do a better job. I simply cannot spend over an hour on a typesetting job and charge only $5.00