Dump That Paperwork
According to Lavelle, when the publishing industry moved from analog to digital, the interface was lacking. "We ended up filling in the gaps with paperwork. When we tried to connect the pieces together, we found we couldn't. We didn't have standardization. There was no integration."
To improve efficiency by eliminating unnecessary paperwork, Lavelle suggested eliminating redundancies in the supply chain, and digitizing both business and production workflows. "Look at your business workflow, and eliminate anything that you or your partners -- designers, purchasers, managers, printers, binders, distributors -- do more than twice," he advised. "Understand the relationship between the business and production workflows. In the industry, we tend to treat them as parallel activities, when, in reality, they should be co-mingled. And that's essentially what the new e-commerce model tries to do."