An Analysis of A Local Printing Company and A Historical Overview of A Local Printing Company

Abstract

The following project was developed as a result of work done during the career development quarter in the summer of 1996, conversations with the President of ABC Printing, the manager of the lithograph section, the manager of the flexograph section, and a silent investor in ABC Printing, which is a partner in OAF Enterprises, and a member of the Board of Directors for ABC Printing. The purpose of these conversations was to discuss the decision making of ABC Printing in the past, present, and future while relating the current position and policy-making of the business to the decisions made in the past, the decisions made on a daily basis, and the decisions to be made in the future. I came to ABC with the intention of doing a Career Development for them. Through a class I had during my junior spring quarter, I learned how to analyze different types of data for the purposes of business decisions. I offered to help ABC analyze their production data in order to help them make better informed decisions about sales, production, and customer distribution. I assumed that this kind of information was readily available and I might be able to go into greater detail if I worked on it full time. Unfortunately this data was almost non-existent. I met with the President and explained the curriculum of Kalamazoo College. He explained that they would hire me for the summer to create the type of data that was missing and use my senior project quarter to analyze the data. I was not excited to learn that I would be inputting numbers on a full-time basis, but the opportunity to have an important influence on a company of this size was too great to miss. This paper will be broken down into five divisions. The first division deals with the present standing of ABC printing based on the history and past decisions of the business. The second division deals with my involvement, contribution, and overall effect on decision making and policy. The third division deals with the future of ABC based on new technology and changes in management's policy on customer distribution and production. The fourth division explains my thoughts and advice for the future of ABC based upon my work and the statistical analysis of ABC's production and customer data. The fifth division contains tables, graphs, and regression results referred to throughout the paper. It is the intent of the paper to relate the productivity of the business presently to the decisions and policies made in the past, along with the desired future position of the business predicted by present decisions and policies. Furthermore, this experience was a personal learning experience where my contributions were serious and extremely helpful.