As a document professional, advisor, and consultant to many organizations I consider it part of my job to keep up on industry news. I watch for trends and spot specific opportunities for our clients. If you're not a client of ours yet, shoot me an email. I'll tell you how we can do the same for you.

 

While I was going through the printed and online publications that I use to stay current I noticed some interesting charts in the July issue of In Plant Graphics magazine.

 

The chart that caught my eye reported the results of a survey of 120 in-plant print centers about their attitudes, plans, and actions during this recessionary period. The responses are a bit surprising. There seem to be some major contradictions.

 

According to the survey, the four biggest challenges faced by in-plants this year are:

 

1. Required budget reductions

2. Difficulty in generating demand/new business

3. Lack of job security for the staff

4. Parent organization is outsourcing work

 

Does this list include concerns you have too? What will you do about them?

 

Well, the shops in the survey said they were going to increase revenue. The top three strategies for doing that were:

 

1. Adding new services

2. Self-promotional marketing

3. Adding new equipment

 

Now here's the interesting part. Over a third of the respondents said they'd spend no money on hardware or software for the rest of the year. 32% of them plan to cut internal staff and 24% are cutting some services.

 

A second chart in the same magazine reported that the vast majority of in-plants rely on trade journals or their peers as their source of information that can be used to help them prepare for the future.

 

Do you see a conflict here? The cost-cutting actions seem to be supporting the challenges and making them worse instead of furthering the organizational goals of increasing revenues. Compound that by limiting your exposure to only ideas in magazines or generated by people within the organization and innovative solutions are likely to be few and far between.

 

A hint about why the in-plants seemed to be so negative is in the response to the survey question about how the in-plants expect the industry to look over the next 12 months. Almost half think it will get worse before it gets better. Only 18% predicted an improvement in the next year.

 

People who see nothing but dark days ahead would gravitate to the short-term cost reductions, I guess. But it seems to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Of course things aren't going to improve in your shop if you've reduced the staff, stopped investing, and eliminated services!

 

Other cost-cutting measures that were mentioned included renegotiating prices with suppliers (who have their own financial issues), changing suppliers, and cutting the marketing budget.

 

I should mention here that while we take a look at lots of strategies when clients ask us to save them money, the actions that were mentioned in this survey are low on the list. If they are considered at all it's in conjunction with other cost-reduction opportunities we've identified.

 

Fortunately, most of the clients we work with take a more progressive approach. These are the organizations that are going to emerge from the recession healthy and ready to support the communication goals of their parent companies. Top-level document centers have realized that the post-recession document business is going to be different. They recognize the need for a fresh perspective that can't be found inside the organization.

 

We help these effective document center managers find waste in their processes and reduce costs instead of laying off valuable employees. We assist with the development of a plan to support their organizations future communication needs instead of eliminating services. And we counsel them on how to promote themselves to their internal clients instead of waiting for the outsourcing axe to fall.

 

We can help you too. All it takes to get started is an email or phone call at (503) 757-6557. We'll get right to work putting together a plan that fits your budget and addresses your own particular challenges.

 

There will be others that will be scrambling and playing catch-up. Undoubtedly some of them will be targets of outsourcing service providers. I hope your shop is not one of those.