Press Success
In the small town of Slayton, Page 1 Printers reinvests in its workforce and flourishes within a shrinking industry.
The 50 employees at Page 1 Printers are working together better and more efficiently than ever. Over the past year, Enterprise Minnesota trained workers in Training Within Industry (TWI), a program that helps workers integrate lean principles into their daily work lives. TWI includes four training modules: Job Instruction, Job Relations, Job Methods and Job Safety. It is also one of the building blocks of creating a lean enterprise.
General Manager Craig Ryan believes the training has helped workers to feel more at ease on the job, and more confident when it comes to offering suggestions for improvements. As a result of the training, Page 1 Printers developed an idea committee to ensure workers’ ideas are heard and considered for implementation.
“When we went through the training, it allowed us to discover so much opportunity to make our business more efficient by using our employees’ ideas, because they had good ones and we just weren’t hearing them,” Ryan says.
Since establishing the idea committee, ideas large and small have helped the company realize significant efficiencies in operations. In the small shipping area, a $500 investment in a computer improved efficiency in communications with other departments, cutting the shipping coordinator’s job down to one-third of the time it used to take. Ryan estimates a $500 savings in labor each week.
Another employee idea has changed the way Page 1 Printers sets color on its press. The company’s press is a massive 120 feet long and two stories tall. Before, press operators had to set color manually, which necessitated miles of walking and stair climbing every day, taking both time and energy away from the company. A recent $400,000 investment in capital eliminates walking by allowing press operators to set color and control other press functions right from a computer console. The switch is saving the company time, movement and paper, enough to gain a full return on investment in three years.
For Ryan, TWI confirmed the importance of investing not only in new machinery, but also in new skills.
“Job Relations [training] helped us to figure out how to better resolve issues between employees. It seems like we’re working better together as a group because we understand how each of us in our own minds works. We can use different methods for different people,” Ryan says. “I’ve never put very much time or effort into training my management supervisory crew, but I expect a lot out of them. You have to remember that you have to invest in them and help them to expand their abilities and grow rather than just putting them out there.”
The efforts have Page 1 Printers poised for a 10 percent sales increase this year, which Ryan says is considerable given the state of his industry. “The conventional printing industry is not growing, so we have to be one of the strong survivors,” he says.
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