LEAN Processes Help Hudson Printing Better Serve Its Customers

Hudson Printing employees completed the LEAN training program on April 6th. The training has allowed Hudson Printing to become much more efficient in how we produce our printed sheets and labels, as well as creating better efficiencies within the Customer Service and Prepress Departments. The nine month program was completed in three stages. The first stage involved every employee and taught the methods and tools of LEAN as well as practical demonstrations. The final segment of stage one involved putting what was taught into practice. The second stage went into further depth, teaching how to implement process improvement throughout the shop as well as teaching more LEAN skills such as Kaizen events, Quick Changeover and Problem solving. The final stage of training focused on supervisors and management, teaching concepts such as Value Stream Mapping and instruction in and facilitation of Kaizen events. In the first full month of our new LEAN workplace, Hudson Printing was able to produce more jobs in less time using fewer man-hours of labor. In other words, LEAN is allowing us to be more efficient in the highly competitive printing industry by providing us with the tools to produce jobs faster, the ability to meet the demand of our customers and produce that work at a lower cost to our company.