To be prosperous in today’s environment, printing organizations must constantly look for better ways to improve efficiencies and reduce costs. To sustain competitiveness, companies continuously update their business practices, processes, and technology. Over time, even the most well conceived business practices become obsolete, inefficient, and unresponsive to the changing needs and priorities of the company and customers. These inefficiencies often create other problems: hampered workflow, production delays, reduced efficiency, and excessive labor costs.

Printing organizations can significantly improve their performance by adopting industry best practices, lean principles, efficient processes, and information technology. These lean principles frequently focus on the identification and elimination of wastes (non value-added activities) in the print manufacturing process. Printing organizations can apply these same “Lean Manufacturing” principles in the administrative environment.

Profectus' Lean Printing Office© consulting solution helps printing organizations eliminate office wastes, increase efficiencies, reduce overhead costs, improve workflow, and enhance the ability to meet customer demands. Lean Printing Office focuses on the areas of sales, estimating, customer services, order entry, purchasing, invoicing, and other office areas. By adapting Lean Printing Office, organizations can significantly reduce administrative costs and increase profitability.

Lean Printing Office eliminates the seven types of waste that are costly to a printing organization.

The Seven Costly Areas of Printing Administrative Waste and Examples
1)	Overproduction
	Producing reports no one reads or needs Making extra copies of jobs tickets Printing, e-mailing, sending, or faxing the same document multiple times Entering repetitive information on work documents or forms
2)	Waiting Waste
	Excessive signatures or approvals Dependency on others to complete tasks Delays in receiving information and order specifications Computer program inadequacies and problems
3)	Motion Waste
	Searching for work documents Searching for customer supplied files Hand-carrying paperwork to another department or process Chasing down obsolete job tickets because of customer changes
4)	Transport Waste
	Delivering documents that are not required Excessive filing of work documents E-mail distribution lists that are not up-to-date
5)	Over-processing Waste
	Duplicating reports or information Repetitive data entry into nonintegrated software applications Changing how information is conveyed between departments Constantly revising documents
6)	Inventory Waste
	Files awaiting signatures or approvals Purchasing excessive inventory materials Obsolete office equipment or management software
7)	Defect Waste
	Data entry errors Pricing and quoting errors Incomplete or incorrect information on job tickets or purchase orders Lost files or records