Production and the Supply Chain
Brief Thoughts About the BISG Supply Chain Survey
When you’re juggling a full plate of projects it can be easy to write off “Supply Chain Issues” as some external force that causes your schedules to be more tightly managed and ship dates to get pushed out, but otherwise unrelated to your day-to-day tasks. But when you take a step back and think about it, there are few roles within publishing more closely related to supply chain planning than production.
The BISG recently published the results of their survey asking folks in our industry what supply-chain-related issues they’re most concerned about, and I thought I’d add a few thoughts from the standpoint of the folks who do the hands-on work to turn the words into books: production and production editorial.
In the survey (see the chart image above), the 4 most common concerns from respondents were (in order):
- Sourcing (of print capacity, paper, other)
- Increased expenses/Inflation
- Freight & Shipping
- Inventory planning
Not only were these the most common concerns, but they were also ranked as the most important concerns to respondents, with Sourcing outweighing all the others, as shown in the chart below.
All 4 of these items have at least one thing in common: they are all affected by the length of the book.
- A longer book = more pages — i.e., more paper and time required to print (sourcing and increased overall cost)
- More pages means a thicker spine, meaning a book that takes up more space (inventory planning)
- A longer book typically means a heavier book (freight and shipping)
Does this mean that every book should be as short as possible, cutting content or sacrificing page margins for profit margins? Certainly not. But there are steps that production folks can take to respond to supply chain woes.
An important first step is to know as early as possible what page count to plan for. When you have to deal with an over-length manuscript or other content-related issue, have a plan for what parts of the design you can tweak to get to different possible page counts if needed (and having an easy way to test design specs with your content before production is underway is crucial). Those in the biz might have guessed already that I’m talking about the mighty castoff.
In our forthcoming interview with veteran publishing guru Ken Brooks about supply chain woes, he helps make the correlation between book production workflows and the supply chain issues that continue to worry us (prepare yourself for serious publishing nerdery): “The big issue with paper is the variation in paper roll sizes and grades. The more variation, the harder it is to forecast need… The need for accurate cast-offs is clearly important to get forecasted demand for materials right. It also helps authors, editors, and designers make sure that they’re not creating too much material or too little material.”
For many publishers, the cost of paper–and how much of it to buy and store–is no small matter. And in that sense, production has a crucial role to play in managing that expense. (We’ll be posting some tips for creating accurate and reader-friendly castoffs in another post in this series.)
As we wrestle with the top supply chain issues affecting our industry, here are some questions to ask ourselves about the current role of production in the planning process:
- How accurate is the current castoff process that you use to forecast costs?
- Is production being involved at the early stages to ensure accurate expectations?
- How much time and effort does it take to meet your page count targets?
- At what point do you know if you’ll make your target page count, and does production have access to easy tools for creating and editing castoffs and book designs when content changes threaten to derail a plan?
- Are there opportunities to integrate your publishing processes for seamless transitions from castoff, to copyediting file, to finished product?
The answers to these questions could help highlight opportunities to streamline your processes and ease some of those supply-chain headaches (or they might shine a light on the outstanding work your staff is already doing!).
Up next: the full interview with Ken Brooks! And after that, we’ll wrap up this series with a few quick tips for putting together castoff specs.
(If you’re interested in learning more about how you can use Hederis to produce quick and accurate castoffs, and about the other ways our platform can help with supply chain woes, visit our website or feel free to contact us with specific questions.)
