Process Alignment for Warners Midlands
Warmer’s are one the UK’s leading printing firms. In a very competitive market with declining margins we were asked to look at some ways of generating greater revenues and margins.
All other printing companies were fighting for the same turf and all were having to reduce their prices as it became ever more competitive.
Rather than simply focus on process improvement or cost optimization we drew a process map for the organisation, brought customers in as ‘purchase orders’ to see where the gaps, areas of duplication, etc were. The company map was represented horizontally. We then mapped some of their clients’ processes, vertically, so we could see where they aligned. In most cases there was one single point of alignment and so we were able to look upstream and downstream on the client processes and thus rather than just print the magazines we were able to hold the database, shrink wrap, send the magazines our directly, put inserts in, etc, etc. Thus Warner’s could offer a total service across the processes and the alignment was at several points in the chain. This generated greater revenues and vastly increased margins.