Has Your Workflow Kept Up With Your Business?

What worked for an offset-focused business ten years ago may be creating unnecessary complexity today.

I was talking with a printer in Virginia recently, and what started as a discussion about workflows ended up becoming a discussion about his business.

Ten years ago, the company was primarily an offset printer. Today, it's about 50% offset, 30% digital, and 20% wide format. If you've been around the industry for a while, that probably doesn't sound unusual. In fact, it sounds a lot like what many commercial printers have done to stay competitive.

What struck me was how naturally it had all happened.

A customer asks for something new. A digital press gets added. An opportunity in wide format appears. One decision leads to another and, before you know it, the company looks very different than it did a decade earlier.

As we talked, he described how jobs moved through the plant. Offset work followed one path. Digital followed another. Wide format had its own process. Different RIPs. Different procedures. Different ways of getting work from file to finished product.

None of that surprised me.

What surprised me was that nobody had really stopped to look at the whole picture.

Every individual decision made sense when it was made. In fact, most of them were good decisions. The company had grown, expanded its capabilities, and adapted to changing customer demands. That's exactly what successful printers are supposed to do.

At some point during the conversation, it hit me that the workflow wasn't broken. It was simply designed for a company that no longer existed.

The workflow had been built around a business that was primarily offset. The business had evolved. The workflow had evolved a little. The result was a collection of production paths that solved specific problems but didn't necessarily work together as well as they could.

That's where the conversation turned to total cost of ownership.

When people talk about TCO, they usually focus on software costs, maintenance agreements, and upgrade fees. Those are easy to measure because somebody sends an invoice.

But let's be real, nobody wants to write a check for complexity.

The problem is that complexity rarely shows up as a line item. It hides in extra steps, duplicate processes, workarounds, and all the little things that become part of everyday life. Nobody notices them because they've always been there.

A few extra minutes on one job doesn't seem like much. Neither does a separate procedure for a different device. Or an extra training requirement for a new operator. But over time, those things add up.

By the end of our conversation, we weren't really talking about workflows anymore.

We were talking about whether the tools that made sense ten years ago still made sense for the business that exists today.

That's a question worth asking.

Not because your workflow is bad. Not because it needs to be replaced. But because businesses change. Customers change. Equipment changes. Markets change.

The companies that thrive are usually pretty good at adapting to those changes.

Maybe it's worth making sure your workflow has adapted, too.

If you'd like to have a real-world conversation about reducing complexity, cleaning up inefficiencies, and bringing multiple production paths under a more unified workflow strategy, I'd be happy to compare notes.

No sales presentation. No pressure. Just a conversation about where your business is today and whether your workflow has kept pace with it. Send me an email...I'm happy to talk!

— Bret Farrah, bfarrah@xitron.com