So, once the decision has been made to modernise the operation of the business, what happens next? The core of every improvement programme is deciding exactly what needs to be done to make the business viable and a good place to get started is to identify your weakest link.

If you consider every manufacturing business to be a chain, where each process represents an individual link, then the ‘chain’ at a typical print business would start with order processing and progress through planning, pre-press, printing, finishing and finally despatch. This is a chain designed to make money, but any chain is likely to break if it is subjected to too much stress – and it will always break at its weakest point.

In a business situation, we are trying to push work along the ‘chain’ and the more work we can process, the more money we can make. However, the throughput of the chain is limited to the maximum speed of the slowest element and this is likely to create a bottleneck.

Under pressure
If you kept throwing more and more orders into your business, which part would break first? Would order processing fall over, or could it push through enough orders to make pre-press the weak link? Without doubt, one link of your chain would eventually be unable to keep up with the rate of work. Then processes in front of the weakest link will build up at the blockage, while processes which follow the bottleneck sit idle, waiting for work. The bottleneck may not necessarily be in one spot all the time so it may be difficult to identify, but think about it like this: if you could choose unlimited capacity in any area of your business, which would it be?

In most cases, I think printers would go for added press capacity. From my experience, it’s clear that the process of putting ink on paper tends to be the biggest constraint for most of us in the industry, simply because every product goes through that process, and the capital cost of the necessary equipment tends to be high.

Now that you have identified your weakest link, the next step is to strengthen it. Examine this link carefully. This link is determining the absolute maximum amount of work through the system. If any other process in the chain has downtime it can be accelerated to catch up, but every time the bottleneck – in this case the press –  loses an hour the whole system does so too.

This should change the way the entire business is run. The weakest link should be elevated in significance above all other processes. It is the most important, and should be treated as such.

In order to do this, you need to make sure you fully capitalise on your investment; minimise the low-value work that gets run through the constraint (and eliminate the jobs run through as favours); concentrate on improvement and maximise the added-value work that you produce. This means maximising the amount of work that delivers the highest margin of return between the sale price and the cost of production.

And this equation must become central to printers’ strategies for winning more business. You need to concentrate your efforts on attracting business that is fast and cheap to process, thus minimising any bottlenecks on press, but which still commands a high retail price.

This is the first and most important lesson from constraints – maximise the value of the process that limits your throughput.

Dave Broadway is managing director of CFH Total Document Management. www.cfh.com