Blog Evolution, the Economy & Throughput

Putting a blog on our website was a new move, especially for me and my commitment to write them on a regular basis. One of my goals has always been to become a better writer, and this seemed like a good place to get started. Well, I read back on the posts I’ve been putting up and actually found them pretty boring. I know it’s tough to read what you wrote and critique it, and I’m usually pretty hard on myself but I really think that I can inject a little more personality into my writing. So I made a decision…I’m going to try to make these posts a little more interesting and easier to read in the future (although it might be a slow change).

So, are things finally heating up a little with the economy? It’s so hard to tell from our perspective, a small business in a midwest city like Dayton, Ohio. But I do believe that the last 2 weeks of August have been the busiest 2 weeks I’ve seen this year. It seems like for the last couple of months, everybody wants a lot of printing and they want it right now. That brings this years purchase decisions to the forefront, and then you really start to wonder about where things are headed in the longer run. So in the name of throughput, we went ahead and purchased.

I like that word, ‘Throughput”. To me, it kind of describes what we all strive for in a printing company, “Putting it Through”. The dictionary describes it as”The amount of materials or items passing through a system or process”. I guess that hits it, but I still like to think of it as a form of printshop measurement. And that was all we needed to pull the purchase trigger, was to raise the throughput….put more work through the system, do it with fewer mistakes and be able to sell it for less. Anyway, back to the economy, I think that Throughput has turned into a major economic driver for us and the printing industry in general.

That analogy scares me though, because it seems like if you just push a lot of work through any system, the quality would drop. Fortunately, that’s not true these days if you research and purchase the right combination of software & equipment. With the automation that Xerox, Heidelberg, Adobe and others are building into their products, the more you throw at them the better they run. And each year, the automation gets better so that each purchase really makes increased Throughput possible (are you sick of that word yet?). And as a printer trying to survive a tough economy, the better we understand our economic drivers the easier it is to know where to invest our money.

Well, I just read back what I wrote, and I don’t think I’ve done a very good a job getting off of the “boring” stuff yet. I promise I’ll try to get a little more interesting in the future (we’ll talked about what we just purchased or something 🙂 ).