My name is Norma Mendoza-Russell, I’m Chief Operating Officer at Pacific Printing in Fresno, California.  And as a Chief Operating Officer the challenges that I’m faced with is productivity and removing bottlenecks and keeping, actually keeping employees motivated.  Keeping management, my Department Managers motivated to in turn motivate their employees. 

Productivity is actually my main concern; my main focus is being productive with the ever-changing industry.  The printing industry with all these structural changes, well that affects how you are producing work.  And you have less and less time and you want to reduce any redundancy, you want to reduce anything that people that’s taking too much time, anything that’s causing spoilage, and anything that’s being touched more than once.  You want to reduce that and be as efficient as possible.  And that’s an ongoing, that’s a continuous improvement in the day to day operations of Pacific Printing and at printing companies.  So you have to be actively looking to improve any area of the company to reduce the time and to be more efficient and in turn, always more profitable. 

So, actually an APL has been tremendously helpful.  The peer group, the operations peer group, the contacts that are made here.  It’s been tremendously helpful in helping us get through some of those challenges that we face daily in removing some of the bottlenecks.