Add Zip to Your Zoning

by Alan Flaherty

Microzoning is becoming a familiar concept among newspaper managers, but actually doing it still poses many hurdles. For many, the biggest economic impact is the loss of net productivity in inserting as zone changes become more frequent. In the old zoning environment, zone changes occurred only two or three times a shift, and five minutes of production time was lost at each change. The effect on productivity was minimal, maybe 5 percent.

But with zone changes every 1,000 packages, five-minute changeover times can cut productivity in half, assuming a base productivity level of 12,000 packages per hour. On a 15-hopper machine operated by 20 people at an average of $10 per hour, that adds $16.70 per thousand packages to direct labor costs and might require purchasing additional equipment. Clearly, there is need to minimize inserting downtime at zone changes.

There are two elements to successful zone-change management. The obvious one is physically changing hoppers and inserts, but the more important one is handling information.

The traditional continuous-process inserting environment becomes a job shop, with many small orders processed in quick succession. Everyone (including the hopper feeders) needs to know not only what to do now, but also what to do next. And preparation for the next task must get started as the current task is being accomplished.

If inserter and stacker operators have and use all the information they need in a well structured fashion, zone changes should require no more than one minute--even on the least-automated inserting machines. One-minute zone changes on 1,000-copy zones reduce net productivity by just 17 percent. Several newspapers are making changes in less than a minute by using late-model inserters and by carefully assembling the information needed for smooth changes.

One key step in minimizing zone-change times is recognizing the work-in-process associated with inserting. WIP begins as jackets are fed from hopper to pocket, and ends as jackets pass through the stacker counter. Depending on inserter size and conveyor length, there may be from 150 to 500 WIP packages. When miss repair is accomplished by recirculating faulty packages through the machine a second time, WIP can extend over 700 or more machine cycles. The magnitude of WIP means that inserting operators must often begin to prepare for an incoming zone while the stacker still has several hundred copies to go.

Operators should clearly understand how many WIP packages are in each inserting system and condition their thinking about zone changes to the work-in-process quantity. Operator action has to be based on jacket-feed counts, not the stacker count of completed packages.

Alan Flaherty is a principal of ComPlan Inc., a Cincinnati-based consulting firm focusing on all phases of newspaper operations. Phone, (513) 769-1440; fax, (513) 769-1446.