Productivity tells you a lot and can use to compare your own company. US/Canadian companies have an average Productivity of $233,000 per employee - with the lowest around $71,000 and the highest about $700,000. The Productivity KPI is interesting as it tells you about your company's efficiency compared to comparable printing companies. The higher revenue you can achieve with minimum staff increases your Productivity and indicates a certain level of utilization of technology, workflow/automation, and being less fragile. Imagine you have many employees to achieve a low revenue. You are very fragile if you can't attract new employees or compete with companies more efficiently - as they will still have the opportunity to compete on price without jeopardizing their Productivity much.
Interestingly on the Top 300 is that only 94 companies are above average, of which only three (3!) companies are among the Top 10 of the list. I find it interesting to understand different KPIs as the world is changing rapidly. The COVID has forced many to lay off people. Others have chosen to invest in new technology. All for the sake of balancing cost/profit, but also because the world is changing forever.
If you look at the big companies, I am pretty confident that they, besides having low Productivity, also have many large clients, where it's common knowledge that margins are lower. This combination makes these companies very fragile.
A company like RRD had a revenue in 2020 of $5,11 billion but only had a Net Income from Operations of $0,09 billion or 1,70%. This is just an example, and probably many good reasons for this. However, the owners and the management needs to address the low margins since the market is changing. The past week, I've been with the Italian company Rotomail, specializing in Transactional print + book production. A very smart company with a dedicated focus on books-of-one where the margin is WAY higher, and competition is not intense. To manage the production of one profitable, Rotomail has developed a web-to-almost everything platform called Bronte. Bronte enables publishers and their partners (i.e., distributors) to order books - and when ordered, no human intervention is needed from order, production, invoicing, etc. Bronte is sold to other book-printing companies and handles all processes literally from imposition, archiving, planning, pre-flight, load-balancing, invoicing, etc. Rotomail has high Productivity and is profitable.
Top X lists are always interesting to read but always more appealing to me if the data can influence my own business. Most printing companies are not comparable to RRD, for example, and though there is an intense bidding war for the company, I am not sure why? The long-tail again proves to be right - on the top 300 list from Printing Impression. Suppose you buy the 20 lowest ranking companies above the average Productivity of $233,000. In that case, you buy yourself a revenue of $832 million with growth from 2020 to 2021 of a little more than 10% vs. RRD, decreased revenue by 16%, and Productivity of only $145,000.
KPIs are important in managing your business, and when you see the numbers presented, always speculate about the perspective! How can you use the numbers to improve your own business?
Login
New User? Signup
Reset Password
Signup
Existing User? Login here
Login here
Reset Password
Please enter your registered email address. You will recieve a link to reset your password via email.
New User? Signup
Currency Exchange Graph