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How sustainable is your business?

In Europe and the United States, customers of the printing and packaging industries are paying increasing attention to the issue of environmental impact. Printing Industries of America, together with the Flexographic Technical Association (FTA) and the Speciality Graphic Imaging Association (SGIA) have formed an organisation called the Sustainable Green Printing Partnership that will monitor and certify registered printers and converters.

The so-called ‘Mandatory Best Practices’ required of printers includes the need to incorporate the ‘3Rs’ of Reduce, Reuse and Recycle in the manufacturing and delivery process. Practices such as the recycling of solvents, scrap film, plates and the recovery of silver from prepress waste water are covered, as are procedures to minimise press waste and maximise energy reduction.

If you would like further information, please contact Erich Kuhl or Louise Moralee at our Johannesburg office.

While environmental issues are not going to go away, the setting of standards and targets for our industry is still some way off, and it’s possibly something about which we need to educate ourselves rather than over react to.

True sustainability
A far more urgent issue, and one which will affect every single company in the industry, is that of ensuring that we have sufficient skilled people to run our businesses.

Far too many companies rely on the practice of ‘poaching’ to replace skilled staff – particularly in the prepress and press departments. This practice has at least two consequences.

Firstly, it creates upward pressure on wage levels as companies compete in a decreasing pool (or as Ken Leid calls it, a puddle!) of skills.

Secondly, it has a knock-on effect as the company losing the person now has to urgently replace him or her, and as a consequence, has to poach elsewhere. As an industry these increasing labour rates place further pressure on our competitiveness, domestically and internationally.

We all recognise the problem, but too few companies recognise that training and developing the talent they need is an investment and not a cost. International printing industry surveys consistently show that companies that invest in training and developing their people are more profitable, not less profitable.

We would be horrified if our local motor dealership was to take some untrained person ‘off the street corner’ to service our highly computerised and expensive motor vehicles – and yet some of us entrust far more expensive equipment to people who are not adequately trained.

We save for retirement; we invest in expensive equipment; we invest in property – all with an eye on growing the future of our companies.
But too few of us are investing in our people. The best equipment is useless without the skills to run it.

My plea to everybody is to think carefully about his or her business strategy. A truly sustainable business is only possible if we develop our own resources, and don’t rely on our competition to do it for us!

 

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