Tapping the Supply Chain Opportunity
I also noted that by rethinking and realistically recasting your assumptions about the business you are in—the manufacturing and the content business—and your value proposition, you can become the master of your link in the chain.
As a highly collaborative industry internally, we tend to overlook competitive threats to ourselves from outside the
industry, as well as threats to the vendors in the supply chain on whom we depend—prepress houses, server hosts, printers, paper mills, distributors and various editorial and production services, for example. Will they be there tomorrow?
Eugene G. Schwartz is editor at large for ForeWord Reviews, an industry observer and an occasional columnist for Book Business magazine. In an earlier career, he was in the printing business and held production management positions at Random House, Prentice-Hall/Goodyear and CRM Books/Psychology Today. A former PMA (IBPA) board member, he has headed his own publishing consultancy, Consortium House. He is also Co-Founder of Worthy Shorts Inc., a development stage online private press and publication service for professionals as well as an online back office publication service for publishers and associations. He is on the Publishing Business Conference and Expo Advisory Board.