NAPL Top Management Conference 2008: Recession Proofing Your Print-based Offerings
Ninety-four printing companies and 264 attendees gathered in Orlando for the National Association for Printing Leadership’s 2008 Top Management Conference. Representatives from two Canadian provinces and the Republic of South Africa were part of the group. “How to” sessions preceded the successful case studies presented by printer panels. Select experts spoke on current national and global issues as well.
“Recessions are sneaky and unpredictable,” offered NAPL’s Chief Economist, Andrew Paparozzi, during his State of the Industry address. Industry sales growth has been slowly deteriorating since mid-2006 and yet over 40% of the NAPL Printer Business Panel reported faster growth in ’07 than ’06. However, pre-tax profitability for 37% of this panel has not been as low since February 2004 – the end of the last recession. All of these national economic woes “were created by the excesses of the late 1990s and earlier this decade,” according to Paparozzi and do not rest solely on the shoulders of Mr. Bernanke or the Federal Reserve Bank. He concludes, “No one knows how long the correction will take or how deep it will go.”
A number of suggestions were offered of how to weather the storm and prepare your company to be even stronger during the come back times. Top of the action list was to communicate with your employees, customers, and suppliers about the economic realities and how you want to move proactively to work with each of these stakeholders. “Don’t let others tell your story,” encouraged Paparozzi. The next three days added other possible action items.
If there was ever a time that your management team should be monitoring your own benchmarking metrics, this is it. The thirteen metrics comprising the proven NAPL Performance Indicators are
| -Value added/sales -Value add/factry hr -EBITDA/sales -Sales/employee -Value add/salesman |
-Gross profit/value add -EBITDA/net tot assets -Days of A/R aging -Value add/employee |
-Value add/factory payroll $ -EBITDA/value added -Rework % of sales -Sales/sales person |
Monitoring some of these on a daily and others on a weekly and monthly basis requires a reliable data collection system and discipline. Using monthly, biennial and annual moving averages is also essential in highlighting critical changes, trends, and nullifying seasonality. “This NAPL Performance Indicators Program will be entirely web-based, beginning next month,” announced Paparozzi. Each firm’s specific results can be compared against the industry norm for the same metric.
