Category Archives: Web to Print Conversion and Development

Confidence Builders

Team building returns rewards. Leaders gain ground in respect. Team members gain ground in confidence. The organization gains ground with increased results, greater capacity, and improved capability.

Boost team by intentional confidence building. Yes, you have that power. Your influence will draw confidence from the well of team member souls. At first, you may meet resentment. An unchallenged associate is an unhappy associate. Imagination and ingenuity get throttled

Robb Harperthrough pursuit of perfection on policy and procedure and process. Lax up. Give room for confidence building challenges.

“The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.” William James, Psychologist

Encourage ownership: A hard look at assignments and processes will reveal areas of evident apathy. Workers have abandoned attempts to master the routine as ownership is robbed. No one takes responsibility for areas everyone owns. Put direct lines of responsibility by assigned team member.

One shop kept loosing critical billing information during a transactional print routine. An unpredictable error was dropping out machine tracking needed for accounting. Lost billing means lost revenue and decreased profitability. An early morning worker had acumen for detailed log work. He was assigned a checkup routine to do during the runs whether he was on that machine or another. Through his ownership and attention, he isolated the technical issue, which was then resolved. He also went the extra mile and began manual log updates to ensure accurate billing during the weeks it took vendor programmers to fix the issue. That young man received a bonus and public recognition. Ownership.

Develop visible accountability: Leaders get specific. You don’t like it when the general memo comes out complaining about a frequently flubbed routine. Everyone is played down over one person’s problem. There needs to be direct and visible accountability.

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” Viktor E. Frankl

Quality suffered in this shop. Finishing staff struggled with print production staff over job handoff. With 200-400 jobs a day running on-demand, there were constant slippage items. Runs were short. Runs were on the wrong stock. Runs had quality shifts from start to end. Finishing teams brought work back for reprint and the due times were missed to customer. A quick and easy scanner checkoff was established that could be tracked to exact time and who was on duty. Slippage lessened. Runs were right count. Quality shifts were resolved at the machine. All it took was having clear and visible accountability to the press operator. Team members put spring back into their step. They now loved competing to see who could do the most with least amount of reruns. Personal pride is amazing.

Require synergy: Don’t ask for synergy. Force it. Mix up work assignments to get team members together on unlikely projects. Put the large format worker in the finishing area helping for a half a day a week. Bring the finishing tech into the print production room for help regularly. Get the creative team on a folder for a few minutes. Why? The power of synergy. When 1 + 1 = 50, you find amazing results. Two finishing operators may come up with a creative solution to a problem. But a finishing operator and a creative, who designs the work and layout, may come up with a completely new product line or streamline an existing line for easier production flow. When that happens, the team energy rises to incredible confidence levels.

Summary: Build confidence in each member and the team with intentional ownership, accountability, and synergy. Stir the pot. Communicate your confidence with visible reliance and trust.

Next blog will emphasize a different feature of high performance teams. Your customers deserve it.

 

ROI/ROECOMMON GROUNDS: These tidbits come out of daily consternations, comments, and concerns of real managers doing what needs done. Executives gain insight.

 This article focuses on the Operations level of the operational pyramid.

Let’s talk: Phil Larson or Shepherd Consulting OK

 

In Plant Planning Survey – 2 minutes. Free Download

 

Print13 happens in a few weeks.  This international gathering of In-Plants and Commercial printers is a powerful way to meet some new folks, get educated and informed, and see what is new and changing.

Your progress probably won’t be on a banner, but it should be noted.  I want to note it.  You can help many others by taking 2 minutes and clicking.

Once I receive your information, I’ll send you a FREE DOWNLOAD of management principles that are gaining great reviews worldwide.  Then, I’ll send you the second set right before Print13.  These pithy principles take no more than 2 minutes each to read and can change your team’s results.

See you there:

R33 – In-Plant Extreme Makeover: From Reactive to Responsive

Date: Tuesday, September 10

8:30 am – 10:00 am

 

 

R33 – In-Plant Extreme Makeover: From Reactive to Responsive

Date: Tuesday, September 10

8:30 am – 10:00 am

Speaker: Phil Larson

Description:

Whether you are tasked as the new manager in succession to follow a manager of multiple decades or are part of an executive committee challenged to build a service responsive in-plant to meet current business demands, you need a fresh approach.  The old ways just won’t do the job anymore.  What will you do?  Executives need good answers from you.  You may not survive without this information.

You will learn:

  • Workflow Efficiencies:  You’ll understand simplified LEAN principles you can gain back useable capacity improvement.
  • Value Add:  how to improve your single source provider influence in the mind of the customer.
  • Product Optimization:  Get the right product mix that has high benefit and fits your location, equipment, and people.
  • Online support and PDF workflow stabilization
  • Client and Customer Management: You will learn key conversations you need to have and what to say when you have them.
  • Business Development / Expansion:  You can grasp the long term view balanced with optimizing the existing business and have an outline to present to decision makers.

Who should attend: In-Plant managers and assistants, Executives with In-Plant line responsibility, Commercial providers looking to improve sourced arrangements, Marketing and sales reps wanting to understand customer decision making, In-Plant technical and creative and customer service support, and Vendors to In-Plants who need to “get it” to support the business

 

Track:
Inplant/Transactional

Phil Larson, President
Shepherd Consulting

Lead with Solutions: Five Key Phrases To Lead

There is power in your words, Leader.

Leaders lead.  We lead with our words, our actions, our intent, and our example.

Leaders lead.  Leading flows from the inner core of a leader outward for followers to follow.  Wisdom literature intrigues and builds me.  Two principles that regurgitate in my meditative time apply here.

  1. What is in your heart comes out your mouth.
  2. Words carry life or death.

Uncomfortable as that may be for some, it is life and energy for leaders.  Those that deny they are being led are fools looking for a place to fail.  Those that accept they are both being led and leading others have matured to a grasp of reality needed for contentedness and success.  Watching words is a key necessity of leadership.

One of the ways leaders lead is with the entry words they use in conversations and meetings and personal engagements.  So let’s look at five phrases that lead well and lead to impact and influence.

How can we lead effectively with our entry words?

Lead #1: How do you feel about this situation?  Leaders fail many times by leading with precooked answers.  Try leading with a question.  The conversation is headed a positive direction based on your quick and thoughtful lead.  Watch out for asking how people think.  That will get you 80% less response than asking them how they feel.  They will tell you what they think in response to asking them how they feel.  For the most part, people are less threatened when asked how they feel than asked how they think.

Lead #2: There could be some amazing benefit to this approach.  You just opened the other person or group up to a positive view of what follows.  Yet, you have not committed anyone to a position of yes or no.  The engagement is now open to include a description of the issue being addressed, but with an expectation of a positive outcome.  Lead on.

Lead #3: What worries you most about our issue?  Wow.  You just posed an emotional tie to the others in conversation.  It is not someone else’s issue, but our issue.  You’ve entered into a supportive stakeholder position and communicated you will be there to help work through the blips.  At the same time, you gave the other person influence in the next steps.

Lead #4: Have you considered a possibility of option X?  This is an enticing lead that suggests a solution without forcing compliance.  Leadership contains an element of power along with authority.  By opening with consideration of an option, meaning there are other options, you give power to the others in the conversation.  It can be a big win when working with a strong leader.  Some leaders place themselves in defensive stance over a position they have taken in the past.  You just graced them with a way out that saves face for them and could bring them better success than a present entrenched option.

Lead #5: Having considered many options, here is one I’d like to bring to the table for discussion.  Okay, this is a lead based on research prior to this moment.   You’ve opened the discussion to include consideration of other options and problem barbs and even rabbit trails.  It is an empowering position for all included.  Sometimes an entire room will just go quiet at this point and let you lead forward.  Be ready for that.  After all, you are a leader.

Summary:  Notice none of these leads starts with the issue at hand.  All of these communicate co-ownership of the issue and the solution and confidence in a positive outcome.  Avoid leading with the issue.  My days are full of conversations that start, “Phil, I have a problem.”  That is a position of weakness.  Sometimes the individual just wants to discuss their ideas.  Many times they are looking to offload the problem and responsibility.  Take responsibility by leading into a solution.  Leading with the solution in today’s environment can be considered pushy and too strong.  Lead with compassion and listening and strength with some key phraseology that reveals intent to engage along with intelligence and ownership.  Lead on, Leader.

Exec/Direct: Effective In House Printing: Customers Are People

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Changing Views

A large retailer directed that every time the word “customer” appears in their marketing it was to be replaced with “people”.  Dehumanizing people is a common characteristic of service organizations.  Historical IT organizations like the term “user” for those that come to them for service.  In Plant and other inside department service teams can get lax in how we view those that provide for our livelihood.  Maybe over time the word “customer” has become too common.  Smart organizations serve people.  People need relationship.

Celebrations of 100%

The phone call was from the manager of one my largest customers.  Usually that call meant some service glitch had occurred.  This time it was different.  She called to tell me that her group had been doing 100% of their business with us for the last six months.  She had not told us.  She had just done it.  Her team loved it.  They loved our people.

Could she come and have a surprise party and celebrate with the team?  Her team and my team together?  Of course.  I love the pictures of that moment.  The smiles had taken years of service and listening and adapting.  But here they were.  These moments are repeatable.

Organizations Are Different

In the university organization relationship development with Athletics, Admissions, Administration, Alumni, and Academics brings big results.  A good friend with over twenty years of good success in a private university taught me that cultural specific.  People have cultures and ways of grouping themselves.  Be attentive.  Both at the executive and ordering customer level, this is critical.  Universities have their own culture that needs stroked and attended.

In corporate America relationship development can vary greatly.  But every organization has the C Suite.  CEO, COO, CIO, CTO, CSO, CRO, CMO, and CFO have some commonalities and some differences.  Executives look for risk reduction, human resource optimization, cost containment, budget stability and predictability, and revenue growth.  Those are common concerns.  Yet, ever executive has a focus area.  Marketing, finance, sales, information, security, risk, operations, technology, and the Executive Officer each have nuances of interest alongside the commonalities.  A smart In Plant studies and meets the needs of the executive organization.

Family companies can differ from stock public owned companies.  The dynamics are different.  The people act differently and have different priorities.  Get specific to your organization.

Industries can differ.  An insurance or finance oriented company looks at minute details and tends to attract analytical managers.  A retail organization is geared for change and adaptation.  Smart departments adapt to the differences evident in the people in the organization.

So How Do You Humanize the Customer?

Working with a university in-plant, my estimate is that they can double and even triple effectiveness and “share of wallet” in existing relationships by tuning into the “voice of the customer”.    Too often, we get focused on the differences we have with those that come to us for service.  Why not look at the similarities?  Why not find the connections we have and commonalities?  Humanize your view of the people you serve.

They have a message to deliver to a group and a response they would like.  Whether it is a course pack for a law professor or a direct personalized mailer for a sales organization, there is a reason for the communication going out on paper and a response that is wanted.  Isn’t that what all of us do all day?  We communicate in order to get a response.  Focus on what that person is looking to accomplish.

The people you serve have demands and pressures.  Sound familiar?  The In-Plant is constantly pushed to deadlines.  It is the last lap in a long race for any organization or company.  The people who we serve are under similar pressures to perform.  Relate.

The people you serve have families and lives outside of their work.  When working with one marketing manager, it was joy to listen as she shared about her husband and children and community activities.  They were different priorities than my life, but most similar in many ways.  The relationship built understanding from family to the work place.

Gain Efficiencies on Trust

Steven Covey is known for his premier work on the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.  His son is known for his work on the Speed of Trust.  Trust built through relationship can enable great communication between “customer” and “service team”.  End to end high speed communication chains in a print service team and customer relationship ensures minimum loss of time and minimum waste in execution.

Enabled service that lives in a humanized relationship with those served provides a value to an organization that is inestimable.  The value of those that serve with the maximum vested interest at heart of those they serve as people not “users” cannot be measured in dollars.  The people served are empowered at a new level that just is hard to convey.  Those people end up bringing double to quadruple the business to the service team.  Maybe you can have a 100% party.

Exec/Direct In-Plant Thrive – Online Optimized

ImageOnline support and pdf workflow stabilization:

The fallacy still exists in the print services industry that you can get by without big feature online services.  You can’t.  Any executive or manager that is looking to improve performance must attend to this item.

A good online and pdf workflow system with right features for customers and production and administrative can drive significant costs out of reworks, job loss to competitors, and lag times on projects.  It also can bring in a constant flow of repeat business and give you a competitive advantage.  You can establish a clear differentiation from competition and integrate your production workflow with the customer workflow.  When they order, you can be the only option on their mind.

Inside the shop, there is an amazing turnaround improvement as wasted hours of looking for information are reduced and the status of every job is known at every moment.

For the administrative team invoice and chargeback information accuracy improves and historical analysis of product mix performance by customer and product type becomes available.

Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt

Why would you not move into this world?  Confusion over what you need leads the biggest fear factor.  Fear of a long project implementation that fails is another uncertainty area.  Doubt that your team can pull off the project correctly is another block to productive adaptation.

What online support is not.

Online support is not an ftp site with a little file information.  That is primitive and is what most print providers call online ordering.  If that is all you have, you need to move forward rapidly to find a more featured solution.

Online support is not job costing with file attachment.  Again, some have moved a step up the chain and adapted to at least give customers some added information.  However, most of those serving and most of those ordering are fully aware, the price at the delivery rarely matches in these type systems.  Customers need accuracy.

Online support is not an order system that resists integration with the other major processes of a production shop.  This can be frustrating.

What is going on in most shops?

In many shops those three represent the extent of online ordering support for the customer and the staff running the shop.  Every executive and manager can improve services for the organization and for the customers by going into a big feature online ordering support.

What does real online ordering and pdf workflow look like?

Okay, get your pencil out and begin to go over the checklist.  In the next ten years, you will be converted to this way of thinking or you might just not be in the business anymore.  It amazes me how much we resist the power of good ideas.  You need to demand your online software vendor support what you are getting ready to read and you need to demand your in-plant find a cost effective implementation for you.

  1. Online ordering requires acceptance of file upload of supported standard file types.
  2. A good system will archive prior files ordered and allow reorder without reupload.
  3. Catalogue collection and customization by client group.
  4. Variable customization of certain orders for dynamic build of post, brochure, business cards.
  5. Look and feel by client group ordering.  Make it personal for the client.
  6. Tight security and separation of file storage.
  7. Dynamic status of order reflecting whether the order has been moved to press, finishing, or shipped.
  8. Content lockdown with marketing, legal, compliance, and any other customer required approvals.
  9. Great systems have fulfillment for non-print items and high demand print items.
  10. Great systems are integrated into automatic invoicing.
  11. Great systems are integrated into shippers like Fedex and UPS for single reference from order point to receipt by the customer.
  12. Great systems have production integration for the shop so internal service can monitor all orders from a single console.

So, what is keeping the industry from running forward?  Automation leaders like VistaPrint and Shutterfly have proven value of powerful online systems.  Of course, an in-plant is not purposed to serve the world with such product, but they can certainly improve the purpose they serve.  There are some tremendous in-plants that have brought incredible value to their customers and owners through adopting online.

Get with it.  Find a way to implement and milk the value out of online and interactive custom ordering services.

FUD Removers

Yes, you do need to deal with the fear, uncertainty and doubt.

  1. Develop a list of criteria.
  2. Talk to key stakeholders in the customer areas.
  3. Build a shortlist of acceptable vendors with an RFI (request for information).
  4. Produce a product list that would be supported with expected sales growth by product.
  5. Calculate waste reductions with a LEAN DOWNTIME approach.  That is another article.
  6. Go for it and make your customers happy.

Light Bulb Moments – Empowered In-Plant Printers

What was that “light-bulb” moment that had the greatest success on your operation?

People serve people?

Online really does work?

I can help others grow?

What Makes A Successful In-Plant Printer Successful?

Finding the right mix of product and service alongside an appreciative customer base helps every in-plant prosper.  Listen as these successful managers tell their stories.  This is one of an insightful series filmed at GraphExpo in 2012.

How can you make the changes needed?

Where will you get the people?

How will you train them?