Production: User Groups Adapt to New Realities

By: W. Eric Schult

Even as discretionary expenses wither on the vine and newspapers redirect scant resources to more fruitful, revenue-generating prospects, there’s still a valid case for preserving a smallish budget line item that may have gone unspent a few years in a row.

It’s probably tucked into a travel or employee development account of the production budget and titled “(Vendor) Users Group.” Substitute “Metro,” “KBA,” “manroland,” “BURT,” “Muller,” in the place of (Vendor) and you’ll have pinpointed the line item in question. If it’s been purged in a previous round of budget cuts, consider restoring it in 2015.

 It represents an increasingly rare opportunity to keep key production personnel attuned to developments in the industry, connected with their peers and vendors, and informed about the common interests and challenges they share.

What’s different for many papers now is that their expertise in certain equipment and technologies has been thinned by attrition. “Over the years, I’ve seen a lot of people with a lot of knowledge (that have) left the industry,” said Alvin Nesmith, production manager of the Tampa Bay (Fla.) Times and a board member for the Metro Users Group (MUG).

Retirement and staff reductions have taken a toll on the breadth and depth of institutional knowledge, while scaled-back investments in training have inhibited the replenishment of those lost resources.

Even for papers with veteran pressroom, packaging and maintenance managers, the terrain has changed around them—in some cases dramatically—if they haven’t attended a user group conference in the past few years or found another means of staying up-to-date on developments.

 Tom Letto, general manager and regional director of publishing services for Gannett’s central region (based at The Courier-Journal in Louisville, Ky.) and a board member of the KBA Users Group, said, “The main issue we’re all having today is electronics.” End-of-life issues for components in KBA’s shaftless presses have become a near-term or immediate concern. “Parts don’t have the same lifespan as (those in) shafted presses,” he said, and some applications need to be replaced because they run on operating systems that are no longer being supported.

Annual user group conferences provide a venue for interactions between vendors and their user base that are more comprehensive and efficient, both for the vendors and their newspaper customers, than occasional vendor site visits at individual newspapers.

“The users run the meeting and run the agenda,” said Bruce Richardson, national sales manager of KBA’s Web presses division. “We’re committed as a vendor to assist with it.” He and Stefan Prohaska, the company’s technical services director, engage the officers of the user group in a dialogue to provide: sponsorship for various events; speakers to address questions about the company’s direction and its relationships with various partners; and technical expertise for participation in open panel discussions, and closed-session interactions with customers to resolve any service issues that come up.

For Kristy Gerry, production director at the Omaha World-Herald and president of the manroland Users Group, one of the primary benefits of these annual meetings between the vendors and their users is identifying problems that are “common across the customer base…We all have the same or similar equipment,” she said. Understanding whether a phenomenon is unique to a site, or else a widespread issue, provides the vendor actionable feedback to expedite resolution.

To varying degrees, user groups commonly open their annual conferences to third-party vendors to help defray the cost of user participation. Event registration and meals are often free, and user group members have only travel and accommodation expenses with which to concern themselves. Third-party vendors are afforded booths on a showroom floor to sell their products and services, and may be invited to participate in panel discussions or speak as experts on new technologies or industry trends affecting the user group members, but the sales pitches of third-party vendors are kept at arm’s length from the programmed meeting sessions.

“We don’t want to make (the meeting sessions) a selling platform (for third-party vendors). Do it at the booth,” Nesmith said, explaining MUG’s philosophy about keeping the sessions educational and product agnostic. He said if a third-party vendor did a presentation, it would be about the subject matter—not a tool or software he’s trying to sell.

In recent years, it’s been a struggle for users groups to regain their footing after the industry stumbled in 2009. The manroland Users Group, for example, suspended its conference that year, but managed to resume with a scaled-down event in 2010, according to Gerry. Where once the group hosted a multiple-day conference, rotating between member sites each year, it now co-locates a single-day event in conjunction with the annual Graph Expo in Chicago. The conference is down to about 25 attendees from its heyday of 100-plus earlier in the aughts, but that’s at least partly because “a lot of sites used to send multiple people,” she said. With travel budgets curtailed, the trend has been that “front-line folks: hands-on guys, maintenance people” are staying home and it’s mostly the operations executives who have been attending.

Rather than suspend their annual conferences while the industry was in the worst of its doldrums, the KBA and Metro Users Groups resorted to virtual webinar formats in 2009 and 2010, respectively.

“It would have been irresponsible for us not to keep that going,” Letto said. “It’s not something you can just walk away from.” The users have “a huge investment with KBA.” While he considers the two-day webinar a successful event and a worthwhile exercise in communications, he acknowledges he loses the face-to-face, which has a lot of value.

 The KBA Users Group subsequently co-located with Graph Expo for a year, but eventually resumed the site-to-site rotation that was more popular with its members. Attendance has improved with a condensed, two-day format at member sites, Letto said. The group’s most recent conferences were in Buffalo, N.Y. in 2013 and Louisville, Ky. in 2014, with 42 members (excluding vendors) attending the latter. The group’s 2015 event is planned for Kansas City in the fall.

Similar to the experience of the manroland Users Group, the delegations that used to travel from each KBA paper to the annual conference have dwindled. “There was a time we’d get multiple people from a site attending an event,” Letto said. “That kind of went by the wayside.”

The KBA users, however, subsequently put into practice the circulation of a pre-conference questionnaire that helps attendees gather input from their operators, electricians and mechanics who are not able to attend. In this way, their questions and concerns may be addressed before and during the event. Letto said it was an idea that arose from a previous conference.

He said KBA receives really good feedback from its users. For example, one idea that came out of a users meeting was the creation of a comprehensive parts inventory that lists spare components user group members in North America keep in stock. This list enables fellow members to cooperate in emergencies to share parts rather than wait for replacements from KBA in Europe. An additional user group suggestion resulted in the establishment of an à la cart list of components a customer can pick and choose to be covered by KBA service contract.

Another group that has gone the gamut from suspending to co-locating to rotating its annual conference is the Muller Martini (MMA) Users Group, which finally settled on hosting at the vendor’s manufacturing facility in Allentown, Pa. Its next meeting is May 7 to 9. Most group members are users of MMA’s SLS product line of post-press inserting equipment, which includes the SLS-1000, SLS-2000 and SLS-3000. Cathy Roberts, a parts specialist for MMA and representative for the company on the user group’s board of directors, said Allentown was selected because many of the company’s resources was located there.

The group, which will have its 25th conference in 2015, had close to 200 attendees during its peak, and after the economic swoon, it is starting to climb again, to 55 at its last conference.

BURT Technologies takes the opposite tack and sends almost everyone from the company—that’s eight employees—to participate in the annual BURT Users Group (BUG) conference that moves from site-to-site, according to Colleen Bynum, BURT’s operations manager.

The group’s advisory board coordinates and visits with different parts of the United States on different production floors. The company’s packaging and distribution software is in use at 70 newspaper sites. “We’re very fortunate to keep this going,” Bynum said. “We’ve had a few lapses (in 2008-09) and we’re keeping our fingers crossed.”

Assuming you’ve done a Google search and you already know your vendors’ users groups have gone defunct or don’t exist, there are still some great options for your paper’s production/operations professionals to network with their industry peers.

One of them is the International Newspaper Group (ING), an organization comprised of newspaper operations executives and a broad range of industry suppliers. While not technically a user group, because it isn’t associated with a specific vendor and the needs of its customers, ING does, however, share with user groups the purpose of providing its newspaper members a venue for exchanging information and best practices and fostering a better understanding of the latest technology and processes impacting newspaper and print production.

ING hosts an annual conference that is co-located with Graph Expo. Richard Danze, acting president of the group and vice president of transportation at the Newark Star-Ledger, said, “We’re completely separate entities, but we hook onto Graph Expo at the start.” The group runs meetings the Saturday prior.

Although vendors are involved in and are members of the group, the conference is product-agnostic. “We don’t allow a vendor to speak at our conference if they’re promoting a product,” Danze said. “We know it’s in their DNA to self-promote (but) their message can’t be an ad campaign…In the last couple of years, it was a conscious decision of the board to use vendors in an educational role, (helping explain) shifts in technology.”

Co-locating the conference with Graph Expo, however, had at least one drawback, when the most recent meeting happened to coincide with an infamous arson fire at a Chicago-area air traffic control center, interfering with group members’ travel arrangements, including Danze’s own. Nonetheless, the meeting drew 160 attendees. “We think (the venue) still serves our best interests,” he said.

The Metro Users Group, too—despite its original focus to serve Goss Metro (double-wide, double-round) newspaper customer—has broadened the scope of its annual conference (held May 28-30 in Tampa, Fla.) to support all comers. Any newspaper delegate, regardless of the make, model or configuration of press, is welcome. Even competing press vendors and their users groups may participate and arrange for breakout sessions of their own. Sessions for users of single-wide presses and post-press equipment users are also envisioned.

 

W. Eric Schult is the operations director at The Fayetteville (N.C.) Observer. Contact him on LinkedIn.com or at schulte@fayobserver.com.