Changes in the publishing industry led to a refocus with an entirely different way of viewing productivity.
Geoff Blackwell says lean thinking is a concept that needs to be continually applied in a business. Photo / APN
Geoff Blackwell says lean thinking is a concept that needs to be continually applied in a business. Photo / APN

Geoff Blackwell is chief executive of Auckland publishers PQ Blackwell and MILK Books, which have a total of 16 staff.

What are some of the productivity issues you had in your business?
We needed to completely rethink our production process to accommodate a decision we took three years ago to add a new print-on-demand business to our existing publishing model.

Our old publishing model involved coming up with ideas for book projects and then developing them from scratch to being finished books.

We would then sell those books to publishers around the world and they would be printed in large runs - from 25,000 at the low end to quarter of a million copies per print run.

However, all of the changes that were occurring in the publishing industry - the arrival of digital books and the impact Amazon has been having on bookshops - were having a negative impact on that model.
So when we made the decision to broaden the business, we decided to employ our book design and production skills to develop MILK Books, an online "create your own book" service where people can go online and design their own beautiful book and have it shipped to their door.

With this new service we went from having print runs of 25,000-plus to making books one at a time. You would think that having dealt with large print runs it would be a piece of cake to make books one at a time, but in fact it was difficult to master the production and the cost efficiencies.
We were on a steep learning curve and some way into the journey we had the opportunity, through New Zealand Trade and Enterprise, to go through the Better By Lean course midway through last year. That was fantastically informative.
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