47 Tips for Cutting Costs Without Cutting Staff
8. Transfer work from outside suppliers/freelancers to in-house staff.
9. Hold off on all new equipment purchases.
10. Prohibit all overtime hours.
Long-term:
11. Avoid high-risk and expensive book projects.
12. Pace new book releases to match capacity of current staff.
13. Defer publishing expansion into uncertain sales categories.
Tips from...
Cären Yang, creative and production manager, Saint Mary’s Press
Winona, Minn.-based religious publisher Saint Mary’s Press has worked with vendor Transcontinental to realize savings in manufacturing and production by adopting lean manufacturing principles. “It affects how we make decisions,” Yang says, “by considering what’s the best way to implement [a practice] so it’s efficient for my upstream and downstream customers.”
14. Add a print-on-demand (POD) center.
For some publishers, it makes sense to add an in-house POD center, which reduces inventory and simplifies order fulfillment. (Saint Mary’s maintains its own shipping/fulfillment area.) “Eighty percent of the products we produce are produced internally,” Yang says. “So it’s a huge cost savings. We keep about one to two weeks of inventory on our shelves for those products.”
15. Set up an electronic inventory and warehouse management system.
Smaller publishers benefit from this as much as bigger ones, Yang says. It allows publishers to coordinate efficiently with printers in order to ship to their docks only what they need at a given time.
16. Use software to streamline workflow.
Saint Mary’s Press saves time and money by uploading documents via the Web for proofreading and other preflight work, eliminating costs for mailing hardcopy proofs. The system also allows errors to be fixed quickly and efficiently.
17. Drop the off-site warehouse.
Thanks to a well-coordinated printing, shipping and fulfillment program, Saint Mary’s now uses a small warehouse in its own facility rather than paying to rent a larger off-site facility.
