I think I’ve heard the word supply chain as much as I’ve heard COVID mentioned over the last six months. New challenges to businesses all around the idea of constraints. We have paper supply chain issues, especially in Europe, the labels and packaging space has been in a supply chain quagmire for many quarters in a row. There are labor constraints impacting almost all market segments.

Constraints put pressure on our businesses and expose where we lack process. In a print business without process, the introduction of constraints simply introduces yet another dramatic emergency to deal with (in addition to the daily ones of simply getting jobs out the door). It’s hard to see the impact of constraints when it takes a lot of heroics to keep the business moving in “standard times.” Now we seem to be faced with a new norm of “non-standard” times all the time. 

Every business is built around constraints. You have an operating budget controlled by your cash flows that keeps your spending within the “constraint” of your available funds. Your labor is constrained by how much they can accomplish in a day’s work. Your presses are constrained by the physics of speed and the skills and efficiency of your press operators. The new constraints of a global pandemic and supply chain and instability in our political systems are laying more constraints over our business entities.