Before you take a break for the weekend, take a few minutes and read about recent PIA activities as well as food-for-thought on health insurance and cost sheets.

At last week's Awards Gala held at Lone Star Park in Grand Prairie, TX, Dallas printer Brodnax Printing was announced as the Best of Show winner for the 25th Annual Graphic Excellence Awards Competition.  The winning entry was a multi-faceted catalog produced for a local prep school.  

 

Kansas City members attending the upcoming Gala at the American Royal on April 24th, will see which local companies won Division honors, as well as who was this year's Best of Kansas City winner.

 

Executive of the Year, Dick Johnson; Gary Reniker EHS Professional of the Year, Joe Cichon, and Jerry Watkins Educator of the Year, Saori Miura will also be acknowledged during the evening.  Jeff Eckstein, with the Willow Printing Group, Ontario Canada, and the 2014 Chairman of the Board for Printing Industries of America, will be a special guest.

 

  

Wear a hat!  

With the Kentucky Derby just around the corner, and with this year's racing theme, the GEA Committee suggest that everyone should wear a hat -- and who knows, you might just win something!

 

 

 

For more information about this event, contact Teresa Campbell at (816) 421-7678.  Reservations can be made online. 

  

The Fairmont Hotel in downtown Dallas was the venue for this year's 25th Annual Continuous Improvement Conference March 30th thru April 2nd.

 

Over 250 people from our industry attended representing companies throughout the United States and Canada, as well as the Philippines and Germany.  This conference is regarded by many as one of the most informative, useful and energizing conferences for our industry... and this year's program lived up to those expectations! 

 

None of the session topics were about industry technology, but rather the entire focus of the sessions was on instilling a culture of Continuous Improvement and Lean Manufacturing (a.k.a. Lean Enterprises). Lean Manufacturing is a culture that focuses on the constant efforts to identify and remove as many non-value adding processes in the workflow as possible, with the goal being that all of the company's efforts are focused on the value processes that the customer is willing to buy.

 

If you would like to learn more about Lean Manufacturing, participate in our Lean Roundtable.  This group of member companies have been learning and sharing Lean concepts for the past several years.  Contact Teresa Campbell if you would like to be included in the group, or Joe Cichon with INX International who chairs the Roundtable.

 

In our industry, the cost sheet, which sums up cost of production (budgeted hourly rates, material and outside purchases plus appropriate markups), continues to be a sacrosanct model used to determine profitability on a job.  We have also developed computerized estimating and job costing systems which all operate on the same model.  

 

This picture seems quite sensible, but try this experiment.  Add up all of the cost sheets on every job for a month and then compare the total profit from jobs and see if it equates to the net income of the firm.  Then pick several more months and do the same.

 

Chances are good that the comparisons will leave you puzzled.  In one month you could find that every job made money, but you lost income on the P&L.  The next month you lost money on the cost sheets, but were in the black on the P&L.  The point being that even in the most finely tuned system, the cost sheet is just an arbitrary number not connected to economic reality.  But does this really matter?

 

Yes, because a system that is tied to his arbitrary model creates price points that either leave money on the table or pass up work that could help pay for the overhead. Profit maximizers realize that fully utilizing the plant (more hours sold without adding additional fixed costs) is the key to profits and that requires prices that get every dollar the client will pay --- but also get the work.  Profit maximizers also understand that labor is a semi-fixed cost and that making decisions purely on sales volume or markups can be a very slippery slope.  These folks not only understand how to fill the shop up (utilization), but also understand value added sales; market pricing; activity level and product line costing, as well as the efficiencies of overtime.

 

As most employers with 50-99 employees know, they received a "reprieve" from the Administration until January 1, 2016 before having to offer compliant healthcare, but there are strings.  

 

Employers with 100 or more employees may not reduce their workforce nor reduce hours to qualify for this delay nor can they reduce their healthcare coverage that they offered February 2, 2014.

 

What is unchanged is that employers with less than 50 are not obligated to offer compliant coverage.  What's also unchanged is that employers who are obligated to provide compliant coverage in 2015 or 2016 may find it cheaper (because of tax consequences/advantages) to offer insurance rather than pay the $2,000 per employee annual non-deductible penalty.  

 

You may test this by downloading the ACA Compliance Alternative Calculator developed by PIA Southern California.