Office and Prepress Change Cycle Case Study

Challenge: To continue to grow sales rapidly and improve its customer offering without increasing headcount in either customer service or prepress.

Solution: Oxuniprint enrolled five of its staff on a Vision in Print (ViP) Office and Prepress Change Cycle (OPCC) programme in order to improve its productivity by optimising information flow, allowing staff to process more work and to gain a competitive edge.

Printers are under increasing pressure to deliver higher quality products, yet with ever-faster turnarounds. In order to do this they need not only to make the most of their existing hardware, but also to focus on their information management processes in order to streamline their operation.

Oxuniprint is the commercial printing division of Oxford University Press. Founded in 1989, the company employs 24 people and provides printing services to Oxford University, Oxford University Press and a growing list of blue-chip clients and local authorities.

The company has seen an 18% growth in commercial customers in one year and aims to double its £2million turnover through expanding commercial work, but retaining and developing the high standards of quality, delivery and service that it has built-up.

Oxuniprint's management decided that to increase productivity the company should not only review printing procedures, but also information management processes. They decided to undertake the ViP Office and Prepress Change Cycle improvement programme to help meet this objective, as it offered the practical tools and techniques the company needed to improve its customer service standards.

George Thomas, Oxuniprint's Director of Printing Services recalls, "We chose five people to take part in the programme who were already aware that our current processes were not working as well as they could have been. They were all really enthusiastic about learning new skills in order to implement sustainable change. They could see how it would remove bottlenecks and standardise processes, which would not only drive efficiencies across the company, but make their jobs easier."

Changing mind-sets

Teams from Oxuniprint had previously taken part in ViP programmes, so the company already had some experience of the positive outcomes these courses can bring. The team chosen for this course were part of a wider effort to fundamentally change the company's mind-set to one of sustainable and continuous improvement. George elaborates. "Our management team is really keen to empower staff to take charge of their working environments, and it's crucial that we back our team in their efforts, so that they have the confidence to make these changes. You can already see the positive effect it has had on morale right across the company.

"If printers in the UK are to remain competitive they need to make a cultural leap, and see themselves as Print Manufacturing Organisations and not just as printers."

The team's mission was to tackle the assumption that the available time that sales and customer service staff could dedicate to new business was a barrier to increasing turnover. The ViP engineer coached the team in Best Practice and Lean management tools and techniques, which they used to map the current process of taking an initial enquiry, right through the estimating, planning, prepress and invoicing chain. This 'process mapping' allowed the team to highlight 96 separate steps, pinpointing it as an overcomplicated process with several major inefficiencies.

Implementing change

Under the direction of the ViP engineer the team created visual aids to help them tackle the problems they had exposed and defined clear objectives such as; the need to create a system for the approval and despatch of proofs, better visibility of job progress and gathering clear and complete information on new orders.

The team then set timescales and detailed objectives for themselves, ensuring each team member knew what was expected by the next phase of the workshop. George comments. "It was really interesting to hear what the team had done to improve Oxuniprint's processes and their enthusiasm and hard work soon began to pay-off. They were able to halve the amount of steps a job goes through, streamlining the process and saving valuable time and effort."

With tangible improvements, which were designed to be sustainable, the team was inspired to tackle larger, more challenging problems, even after the course was over. This ensured a switch to a culture of continuous improvement in which changes are constant, gradual and therefore sustainable.

The results

George continues. "We audit all our processes against Key Performance Indicators now, and I was really pleased to see that their initiatives have had such an impact on the business. For example, they aimed to eradicate any non-value adding activities in the production of proofs. This has resulted in the prepress department alone, handling this work. Interestingly, the department discovered that even with less people managing the work, the processes were so improved that the turnover and delivery rate has been vastly improved, with 98% first time approval of proofs."

Companies that take part in the Office and Prepress Change Cycle can look forward to increased levels of customer satisfaction, for example, at Oxuniprint the OTIF (On Time In Full) delivery of jobs, rose from 82% in October 2004 to 100% for the same period in 2005.

George concludes. "The Office and Prepress Change Cycle was a really positive experience for us, not only has it motivated staff to make continuous improvements to their working environments, but it has directly affected our profitability. In December our turnover was 30% up on the same period the year before, and 40% up on bottom line performance. I expect that the return on investment on the course will exceed 12 times the initial investment."

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