Advice for Printers: Quick Wins Go the Distance

The high-speed, competitive nature of the print industry causes print providers to routinely face challenges in terms of customer satisfaction and retention, job turnaround time and bottlenecks. Print providers often assume that errors are caused by a lack of quality control and add extra eyes to that process. In reality, however, adding additional quality control doesn’t necessarily add value.

Lean Six Sigma is a rigorous, data-driven and results-oriented methodology that helps to find the root cause of the error, so print providers can eliminate it, rather than inspect for it. In short, improving the process will improve results, and can quickly make a significant impact on the business.

Lean Six Sigma battles a major misconception in the print industry—that all projects are complex and time intensive. However, utilizing Lean Six Sigma thinking in everyday work can return immediate and tangible results. These “quick wins” can reduce errors and improve productivity with minimal effort and time.

To identify these quick wins, consider:

• Collecting the Voice of the Customer (VOC)—There is no better way to understand how to better serve customers than by gathering their direct feedback. Developing lasting customer relationships requires an intimate understanding of the customers’ needs, a tremendous amount of listening and a lot of dialogue. Surveys, interviews, and focus groups are useful in turning that dialogue into formal feedback that can be collected and analyzed. The VOC can then be prioritized and translated into requirements that are critical to quality. Simple tools like a Kano analysis (see example below) can be used to help shape the approach to developing solutions that address those customers’ needs. A Kano analysis helps to understand the relationship between needs and customer satisfaction, dissatisfaction and delight. It helps a provider to focus on solutions that will achieve maximum satisfaction for customers based on spoken and unspoken needs.
• Leveraging blitz or Kaizen events—These are short (three to five days) events that go through the DMAIC process of Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve and Control at an accelerated pace. DMAIC is a Six Sigma methodology used for initiatives aimed at improving an existing business process. Efforts in a Kaizen are concentrated on improving a focused area of the process and solutions are implemented immediately. Kaizens are a great place to start for organizations hesitant to deploy a full project until the results that Lean Six Sigma can deliver are proven first-hand.
• Mapping the Process—Oftentimes, no two people in an organization understand all the steps involved in a process. Without this collective understanding it is difficult to truly assess where value is created or where problems exist. Value stream or process flow mapping are simple, yet elegant, fact-based approaches to address this. To develop a process map, bring all the key people involved in the process together to agree upon hands-off, steps performed, process flow and timing, along with time spent idle. Determine whether each step adds value to the business or customer. Organizations often find that several steps of each process add no value at all. Taking the time to visualize the process in this way illustrates pain points and helps focus efforts and resources on the true problem areas.
• Brainstorming—This is one of the most powerful and
  potentially under-used tools of an organization: the collective creativity of its human resources. In a short period of time, a vast number of ideas and solutions can be generated. The keys to the success of this exercise are to clearly define the topic or problem to be discussed, encourage everyone to participate, and reject no ideas during the session—capture everything. Mind mapping software is a great way to logically and visually structure group thought processes.

Case in Point
The Canadian Department of National Defence was experiencing challenges in their print shop as they attempted to address major workflow issues including loss of productivity, trouble getting jobs through the shop and out to customers and managing the production environment. Xerox Lean Six Sigma led a small team through a DMA event, an abbreviated form of DMAIC using the Define, Measure and Analyze phases, to scope out the true nature of the problems. The organization found that a reliance on manual tasks was introducing a potential for error along each step. The team was able to significantly improve productivity by identifying non-value added processes as well as providing a blueprint for automating their workflow processes for consistency, efficiency and cost savings.

A print provider in Dallas was recently struggling with similar problems as they faced customer dissatisfaction on top of revenue loss, waste and quality control issues. The organization was at risk of losing clients if underlying problems were not resolved. A team was again engaged to implement a DMA event.

The first step was to bring all the stakeholders together—from customer service and account representatives to production and IT staff—to come to an agreed upon definition of the process. The team used a process map to track everything from taking the order to final delivery of the job to the customer. Once everyone had visibility to the complete process, it was easy to see where and why problems were occurring and solutions began to fall in line. The print provider completed the two-day event with 11 quick wins and a series of long-term projects that were clearly identified. Key quick wins included:

• Standardizing the process: the potential for error increases when two people are doing the same task in a different way. The event helped the team to visualize the best possible way to complete the process in a way that worked for everyone involved.
• Sharing the VOC: the team found that customer feedback was not always made available to the people who needed it, resulting in repeat mistakes. Eliminating a bottleneck like this can begin to dramatically improve customer satisfaction, improve customer retention and loyalty, and help secure new contracts.

Knowledge of Lean Six Sigma tools can be a powerful asset to print providers. Bring the resources and benefits to the organization by identifying a team or several individuals to train in the methodology, or engage a qualified third-party strategic partner.

Chris Irick is a Lean Six Sigma black belt candidate and certified green belt with Xerox Corp.