Last week Printing Industries of America was honored to once again host a delegation of Japanese printing executives to our headquarters building.  During our visit, we exchanged information on our respective economies, outlooks for our industries and hopes for the future.  We naturally began our visit by expressing our deepest sympathies and concerns over the recent tragedy inJapan, extending our best wishes for a return to normalcy and health for all citizens of the country. Our Japanese friends painted a bleak picture of their industry which in many ways mirrored the conditions we have experienced during the recent recession.  They note that their industry peaked in 1997 due to a larger population, rapid economic growth and an increase in information circulation whereas it is now faltering because of an aging society and diversified media. In 2008 there noted a paradigm shift in their industry that they attribute to three things: the fall of Lehman Brothers; an initiative by their Prime Minister, Yukio Hatoyama, which aims to cut down 25% of CO2 emissions; and the revolution of electronic devices like the iPad. Ink, paper, and printing industry shipments reached their lowest point in 2009, but they are bouncing back despite the low demand for print. By 2020 the Japanese hope to emerge a leaner industry. This will mean fewer overall printers doing more printing. While commercial and publication printing is wavering, packaging, specialized, and label printing will maintain a viable option for businesses going forward while software service will see growth.   The parallels to the American industry in this regard are startling. Like many printers in America are becoming “marketing service providers,” Japanese printers have taken notice and are shifting to becoming “solution providers” themselves although it is important to note that culturally the way goods are marketed in Japan are somewhat different than here in the U.S.  The view solution providers are printers who solve the problems clients and society have by using technology and knowledge.  Printers that adapt to new technology, offer a wide array of services, and diversify themselves will be the ones leading the industry in the future.  The same of course can be said here in theUnited States. Needless to say it was a fascinating exchange and we are grateful and honored to have hosted Kenichi Soma, Atsuyoshi Kimura, Masato Usuda, Hiroyuki Shimamura, and Chie Ohlsson to Pittsburgh. Our thoughts and prayers go out with them as they continue to deal with the tsunami aftermath. If you have any questions for our visitors, please leave a comment on this post. Once we have a few we’ll post another blog with a Q&A with a member of the All Japan Federation of Printing Industry Associations....

The 2011 Continuous Improvement Conference recently came to a close (we’ll have a wrap-up of the conference coming soon!), and if you weren’t able to attend, don’t worry, we have you covered. We recorded a series of videos focusing on the fundamentals of continuous improvement and operational excellence. Embedded below, you’ll find videos that answer some of the basic questions like: How to budget for Lean transformation, why Lean, and what metrics need to be measured. Let us know what you think of the videos in the comments below.        ...

In 2010 industry sales rebounded from the lows of 2009, increasing by 2.79% to $144.6 billion. 2009 was the first time in the 89 years that Printing Industriesof America has been tracking industry profitability via the Ratios Survey that we calculated industry losses. Losses as a percent of sales averaged 1.4% for all printers in 2009 and profit leaders (the top 25% of respondents) profit as a percentage of sales declined from 9.4% in 2008 to 7.0% in 2009. Despite the Great Recession profit leaders still earned a significant profit before taxes. How did profit leaders earn a profit in 2009 despite declining sales and the weak economy? Taking a look at the results from the 2010-2011 Ratios Survey (fiscal year 2009 results) the most impressive difference is the total Factory Cost of Product. As a percent of sales the average printer dedicated 80% of their sales on Total Factory Cost of Product expenses, which include Factory Payroll and Factory Expenses, while profit leaders only spent 73.8%. This more efficient use of both labor and capital explains 75% of the divide in profitability between the leaders and the industry average. According to our quarterly survey of printers both sales and profitability improved in 2010. On average printers sales increased by 5% and earned a reported profit on sales of 4.1%*. Total industry sales increased by 2.79% after adjusting for those firms that closed their doors in 2010. The graph below is a diffusion index of industry sales and profits for 2010. It is calculated by taking the percent of printers reporting increasing sales/profits subtracted by those reporting declining sales/profits.   We are in the process of collecting data for the 2011 Ratios Survey. If you are interested in discovering how you are performing compared to industry profit leaders and learning where your company needs to focus its efforts to increase productivity and profitability go to www.printing.org/ratios to participate.  Next time we’ll take an in depth look at the difference between the industry average and profit leaders Total Factory Cost of Product for a $3 million, $10 million and $18 million printer. *Quarterly profit as a percent of sales collected in the Quarterly Print Market Survey tends to be higher than what is collected in the Ratios Survey. This is most likely the result of the QMS figure being based on between 200 to 300 responses and the Ratios figure having a significantly larger sample size of between 400 to 500 printers. The QMS figure is a good directional indicator but in terms of magnitude tends to be...

We’re now accepting entries for the web2awards, and, in its third year, it’s poised to once again highlight print service providers that are using web and online technology to grow their businesses. We continue to improve and refine the competition, with a new streamlined entry form that will make the actual entry process easy and separate categories for small, media and large companies to even-up the playing field. And this year we’ve added two new categories that recognize how social media has a growing role in what we do. The Social Media/Cross-Media Campaign/Promotional Case Study category is one in which we hope to see a lot of participation. If you have a story about how you’ve used social media or cross-media to showcase and grow your business, we want to hear about it. Have you used Twitter to find customers talking about your business and held a conversation with them? Did your YouTube video score you thousands of hits and bolster business? Are you using QR codes in a way no one else is? Tell us your story and include as much evidence as you can (especially tangible metrics if you’re measuring things like responses, traffic on the site, SEO ranking changes, etc.) The judging on this will be a bit different than the other categories, it will bit more subjective, but our panel of judges look forward to hearing what participants have been doing in our integrated media world.   We’re calling the second new category the People’s Choice Award and we think it will be a lot of fun. The web is so people-focused, and we think it makes sense to give anyone, not just our esteemed panel of judges, a chance to vote in the web2awards. After the entry deadline on May 31st, we’ll be putting all the entered sites onto the web2award site. Entrants can point their customers, friends, family or anyone they wish to that page so they can cast a vote. We’re not putting restrictions into the system, so people can vote multiple times for the same entry if they wish. The purpose of the People’s Choice Award is to offer a way for entrants to take a more active role in the competition, possibly use it in their own brand-awareness campaign, and maybe even raise the web2award competitions visibility as well! We hope everyone has fun with this. To let people try it out before the 2011 entries are ready, we posted the 2010 participants and put up a voting page. The winner of the People’s Choice Award will be recognized with a unique trophy at the end of the competition.  For more information about the web2awards, the rules, how to enter,...

The Binding Industries Associaton Conference is coming up in May and we took the time to talk with past attendee Frank Shear, president, Seaboard Bindery, Inc., about his conference experience. Enjoy the brief interview and let us know what you think in the comments! Have you implemented anything you’ve learned from the BIA conference into your own work? Most definitely.    Much of what I take back with me results from conversations with people. I remember a discussion from one year about employee communication that resulted in me having monthly meetings with our employees to review what we have accomplished in the past month and discuss challenges and opportunities ahead.  Employees have told me they find value in those brief meetings. What were some of the takeaways from the conference? One part of the marketing session involved discussion of where social media marketing fits into the marketing mix.  We are now trying to implement a social media focus into our marketing. Last year there was a panel of print buyers discussing how binders can expand their reach into non-traditional customers.  We have implemented some of this here. Two years ago the seminar on mailing and fulfillment really excited me.  We started offering more fulfillment as part of our services, not to the degree of a specialty fulfillment house, but to give us added value. How useful were the tours? The tours are always eye opening.  There is always something that someone else does differently.  We all get to the same end point, but the paths there are always different.  You get to chat with operators, you get to watch jobs run, it’s a great time to pick the brains of others looking at the same process. New ideas pop up, the juices start flowing. Was it useful to share ideas with your peers? That is what the conference is all about.  The most effective learning for me comes with simply chatting with others. You might overhear someone talking about a problem that you are encountering, or a solution that they are implementing for a problem that you share.  Standing around and talking is perhaps one of the best opportunities to learn. What would you say to someone on the fence about attending the BIA Conference? One never knows what is likely to come up from a seminar or person to person discussion.  I have always had some issue in common with whomever I happened to be talking with.  One new idea or insight can be priceless....

It’s that time of the year again–we’re now accepting entries for the Premier Print Awards! This is a great time to be in the print industry because we get flooded with print pieces from all over the world. We see the pop-up books, all sorts of magazines, fascinating labels, and incredibly complex and detailed printed pieces. If you haven’t listened to this interview with Wyatt Hogue , vice president of Adams Lithographing, the Best of Show winner last year, it provides great insight for how important this award is for a company. Last year, I had the opportunity to cover the judging process. I wrote up a detailed post which you can find here . It was breathtaking to see a press room filled with print and I’m eager to see what sort of pieces we’ll see this...