SANTA BARBARA, CA, MARCH 8, 2007 – “Strategic assessments are an absolutely critical undertaking for today’s graphic communications companies. Too often, company owners and managers are so busy working in their business, they don’t take the time to work on their business,” notes Tim Fischer, NAPL executive vice president and chief operating officer, in an audio podcast recorded today at NAPL’s Top Management Conference in Santa Barbara. “Strategic assessments allow you to take a step back and say, ‘What is it that I want to accomplish and how are we going to go about doing it?’” In the audio program, Fischer, who had just presented at TMC session on Strategic Assessments, focused on how measuring key metrics can help companies assess their current performance and their progress on the path of continuous improvement. “You can’t improve what you can’t measure,” said Fischer, who noted that printers should focus on measuring the vital few metrics that have the most relevance to an organization’s performance rather than the trivial many that might not provide meaningful data. The data gained through measurement can go a long way toward supporting continuous improvement, Fischer notes in the podcast, emphasizing, however, that “simply the act of measuring in itself can go a long way toward helping a company improve its processes, especially if the company gets employees involved in the effort.” The podcast and other podcasts from NAPL’s Top Management Conference 2007 are available at no charge at www.napl.org for downloading and listening on computers or on digital audio players. NAPL podcasts are sponsored by HP (www.hp.com) and produced for NAPL by Professional Podcasts, LLC, Cherry Hill, NJ.