Implementation of Lean Document Production in the Printing Industry

A previous Interfaces (Edelman Finalist) paper by Rai et al. [12] described the LDP Lean Document Production toolkit and work process based on operations research techniques that demonstrated significant improvements in the productivity of small to mid-sized print shops. In this paper, the extensions of the methodology to improve productivity of very large print shops are described. The printing industry is segmented into four quadrants based on resource utilization and job variability. Job variability in one of the industry segments is extremely high and is characterized by fat-tail distributions. This paper describes the extensions required to handle the applications of LDP Lean Document Production to this market segment. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]