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Situation Analysis: ClientCo is one of the world's largest, most respected newspaper and digital media publishers. For the multi-newspaper supply chain network, declining ad revenues and circulation rates were exacerbating longstanding problems and posing new challenges. Decreases in production volume increased costs and idle capacity. Poor service performance resulted in high levels of advertiser credits, discounts, "make goods" and lost revenue. An inflexible supply chain limited the ClientCo's ability to provide third-party publishing and distribution services.

The Lab was commissioned by executive management to rapidly expand the range of near-term, non-technology improvement opportunities available across the company's multiple newspaper supply chain operations. Management sought to augment the efforts of its existing internal improvement teams with a supply chain improvement "template" that targeted common problems and could apply to multiple newspaper properties.

Improvements Identified: Within eight weeks, The Lab's initial Phase I analysis identified over 300 lean, Class I® non-technology improvements across a single newspaper's supply chain operations. Roughly 75% of the improvements required no additional investment in technology or infrastructure and one-third of these were "immediate action" improvements which could be implemented within 60 days or less. Improvements were dispersed equally across six broad areas that comprised the supply chain organization:

Improvements that simultaneously reduced costs and increased production flexibility were a top priority. Consequently, supply chain improvement efforts were coordinated with the newspapers' sales and marketing groups to directly link improved capabilities to customers' highest priorities: ad position guarantees, reduced lead time for inbound copy, shorter minimum run length, and others.

Overall Results: Subsequent analysis of other ClientCo newspapers indicated that over 85% of the improvements and benefits were common to all locations. "Templates" for improvement opportunities, best practices, benefits quantification, operational measures and implementation work plans were deployed in multiple locations. The Lab teams worked with the ClientCo internal Six Sigma improvement teams to achieve the targeted benefits.