Paperman: unlocking the potential of paper management

Publishers and printers can gain significant cost benefits and efficiency savings from taking control of paper purchasing and stock management through a system such as Paperman.

Paper can account for 50 to 60% of the total cost of producing a magazine or catalogue, and yet there are a number of ways in which both publishers and print suppliers could more efficiently manage the purchasing and supply of their paper.

“When you consider how exciting a brand new catalogue or magazine is in terms of its content, probably the most important and certainly the most expensive item contained in the magazine is the paper it was printed on,” says John Stevens of Paperman, an electronic paper management system that is growing in popularity with UK publishers such as Emap, Haymarket and The Economist, as well as with major print groups such as the Wyndeham Press Group, and Pindar Tewkesbury.

There is very much more to gain, Stevens contends, both for publishers and their printers by gaining more control of paper ordering, delivery and usage. Close collaboration between the two parties can be enhanced further through the use of a system like Paperman, which allows both the publisher and its printers to see a common stock database, to update schedules and usage and record deliveries against that same shared database.

As well as the cost savings that can accrue for the publisher by gaining better management control of a resource that can account for 50% of its costs, printers also gain huge value from having access to the publishers forecast print schedule for maybe up to the next 12 months, says Stevens.

Indeed a printer could use Paperman to manage customers paper should they not wish to do so themselves. Such a move requires the employment or training of a staff member in the art of buying and managing the paper usage, or alternatively using the services of a paper management consultant who could prove cost feasible.

To maximize the benefits of paper management says Stevens what’s also required though is a good computerised paper management system that assists in configuring magazines, planning print runs, managing stock replenishment, and of course supplies the accounts department with the figures it needs. The spirit of a close working relationship between printer and publisher can really come to fruition through systems such as Paperman, he adds.

Buying paper and properly managing that paper will automatically involve the calculation by the publisher or printer of theoretical usage, thereby making the identification of over-usage an automatic process, and the resultant possibility of a further saving. A good paper management system can also keep surplus stock to a minimum, and of course that paper will be used either in the next print run or on another magazine.

Good stock management has been a benefit that customer publisher Redactive Media Group quickly identified with a trial version of Paperman. It has now been using the full system for more than a year. Procurement and operations manager Gary Smith has found that using Paperman has saved a significant amount of time since he no longer needs to keep spreadsheets updated manually. In addition, the publisher’s paper merchants are using Paperman, while its printers are moving towards logging data onto the system on the publisher’s behalf. Information on Redactive’s paper supplies is therefore much more timely, and will become still more so as printers graduate onto Paperman.

Smith says: “Paperman allows me to stock manage more effectively. I can see the usage, see whether we are over-stocked or when we need to re-order. We noticed in the trial that we were being over-stocked by one paper mill at certain times of the year, so we stopped that and saved money on cash flow.”

In today’s business climate of environmental responsibility and waste reduction, Paperman can also make a positive contribution. It enables printers and publishers to purchase paper in the most efficient reel widths to allow the best utilization of their paper. If a printer buys standard reel widths, for example 870s, and runs them on a 630mm cutoff press, then that will be quite efficient for, say, an A4 magazine where there will be a paper utilization of 91% - i.e. 9% is wasted.

However if the publisher prints a smaller magazine, for example 285mm by 195mm, on that same reel width then utilization goes down to 81%, with a 19% waste rate before printing even starts. Once the make ready and running waste is added, the overall rate of wastage can be in the order of 30%, as opposed to 20% with A4. If a reel width of 800mm is used and the cutoff reduced to 625mm, the utilization increases to 89%, says Stevens. These can be complicated equations though, and it would be useful to have a tool to make such calculations a simple process – and this is what Paperman can do.

Many publishers are also in the process of switching publications across to more environmentally friendly papers, such as recycled and FSC or PEFC certified stocks. The Paperman system is able to assist publishers going through the administrative burden of proving the percentages of certified paper used through a complete FSC and PEFC audit of paper.

Redactive’s Gary Smith has certainly found this to be the case. The company publishes titles for clients such as the Chartered Institute of Purchasing & Supply, the Royal British Legion and Age Concern, and was the first customer publisher to achieve PEFC certification, says Smith.

“We’ve definitely found that using Paperman has reduced the manual labour in recording and demonstrating the proportion of certified paper we use,” Smith continues. “I was using spreadsheets and having to set up a formula to work out the percentage of PEFC paper, but Paperman does it automatically and you can just pull off a report. It’s so easy to use.”

He reports that Redactive is soon to move its biggest title onto 85% certified PEFC stock, and indeed each of the publisher’s full service titles have moved or are about to move onto high percentage PEFC graded paper, subject to each title undergoing an audit.

Haymarket is another publisher currently using Paperman through this process, and Elaine Bevan of the publisher is receiving Chain of Custody data via Papinet Invoices, processed by Paperman, for the certified stocks that Haymarket uses. The benefits of this are in the future for Haymarket while it gets this information into the system in the first place.

“It will be a brilliant system when it can show us how many times a paper has been used and how much tonnage is certified. More and more printers are linking into it as well to record delivery, so the information is becoming more and more immediate,” says Bevan.

Case study – Titan Publishing Group

Titan Publishing Group Limited, the publisher that produces high quality magazines and graphical novels such as Lost and Wallace and Gromit, has discovered that by buying and managing its own paper it can save significant amounts of money. Titan can also now choose its preferred paper for all its magazines and books, rather than having to use generic papers supplied by its printers.

This change has come about since Titan appointed a new print and paper buyer in Kevin Wooff, who on discovering that Titan allowed its printer to supply all the paper, immediately investigated the costs and work involved in managing that paper himself.

Titan purchases something in the order five thousand tonnes of paper per year, which at an average price of £500 per tonne represents £2,500,000 a year. A 10% saving, therefore is going to represent as much as £250,000.

Before taking the plunge, Wooff was able to use a trial version of Paperman for a couple of months to test out the possible advantages and pitfalls of buying and managing his own paper. He also used the advice of an experienced paper management consultant from Huie Associates to point him in the right direction.

In using Paperman, Wooff realised that considerably more paper was being used than was necessary and that alternative papers could be used on certain magazines. He was also impressed at how flexible Paperman is handling both metric and imperial and also how it simplifies the processes involved in forecasting, buying and managing his own paper.

The paper mills were called in to tender for the supply of paper needed both in the UK and the US, where Titan publishes many of its titles, and the publisher went live with Paperman in the spring of 2007. Titan is now implementing electronic ordering and invoicing thus reducing the amount of effort needed to record data, and has linked Paperman directly to its publishing scheduling system, making it responsive to schedule changes.

“The biggest thing is that there are no conflicts between paper suppliers with Paperman,” says Wooff. “We can let them use the system without seeing prices, and printers can look on there for print run forecasts. If they overuse paper we charge them for it and if they under-use paper we can share the dividends, which everyone seems quite happy with.

“I’ve been at Titan for eight months and paper was part of the agenda the company wanted me to look at, but it had no idea of the benefits paper management could bring, and those are pretty substantial if you buy and manage your own paper in partnership with your printers.”