The group has announced what it described as “a major reorganisation” at its UK business, which had sales of almost £115m in its most recent results to March 2014.
The UK operations will now be divided into two divisions: Trade book printing, and STMA and Commercial printing.
A new, flatter management structure will see the return of former sales director Alison Kaye who will become divisional general manager of STMA and Commercial, reporting directly to CPI Group president Pierre-Francois Catté.
Kaye left CPI in 2013 to join St Ives as sales director of its Service Graphics business. She is currently working her notice and is expected to take up her new role in the summer.
Martin Collyer, most recently head of digital at CPI, becomes divisional manager reporting to Kaye.
Francois Golicheff, currently chief executive of CPI UK, will oversee the Trade operation and manage the transition until Kaye joins, when he will leave the group.
CPI chief operating officer Ian Browning-Smith has also left the business as a result of the reorganisation.
Catté praised the contribution of both Golicheff and Browning-Smith. He told PrintWeek: “They have both done a very good job, but we now need less heavy-duty cross-functional people. We have taken out a layer of management which makes us faster and lighter,” he said.
“In every country we are giving more power to our sales organisations in terms of pricing and go-to-market. We have done a lot of work re-engineering our businesses, and we now want to be less technology-driven and more market-driven,” Catté added.
The Trade books business will be headed by Tanya Dunbar, previously CPI’s UK sales director.
Sandy Wieliczko, who had worked at the group for almost 20 years in a number of senior management roles, has rejoined the business today (9 April) as Trade books operations manager. He will also have across-the-board responsibility for human resources.
“Functional operations will be distributed, because we don’t want to duplicate,” Catté explained.
Dunbar and Wieliczko also report to Catté.
“I am very happy,” he said. “Tanya, Alison and Sandy are very well-known people, and these new appointments and our new model has already had a very positive reaction from customers.”
Catté said the business remained committed to trade book printing, despite losing out when Penguin Random House awarded a sole supplier contract to St Ives Clays at the beginning of the year. CPI closed the former Cox & Wyman business in Reading as a result.
“As you can imagine, I was not happy about Penguin Random House. But at a group level trade is our foundation. We will keep on investing intensively in our trade book division, it is very important to us,” he stated.
“With this restructuring we were very careful to make sure we still have capacity for larger contracts in the future.”
Catté said CPI aimed to leverage the strength of its pan-European footprint via an integrated ‘one point of entry’ approach for customers. “We have 15 printing plants around Europe. We want to mutualise the use of those factories, so customers can enter an order in the UK, or Germany, and use our network of different factories and services.”
The €350m (£254m) turnover group has made a huge investment in HP inkjet technology for its ‘Quantum’ digital book printing lines, and has just ordered a 10th system. This will be installed in France, where the group is also headquartered.
