The encyclopedia · Engineering & Operations · Operational decision · 2006–2007
Standard Register cuts landed cost by re-routing print orders across plants
Standard Register used regression, optimization and simulation to route print orders, targeting $10M+ a year.
Standard Register Company
the move
Standard Register led high-volume production of business forms and print stationery for major US firms, competing on price in a shrinking traditional print segment.
To minimize total landed cost, the team applied three operations research techniques: regressions to estimate each printing press's cost and time efficiency on different job types, optimization to pick the optimal order-routing strategy, and simulation to assess optimal and heuristic allocation under uncertainty of customer orders and equipment performance.
The combination let the company route each order across its production-distribution network to the press that was genuinely cheapest for that job.
why it works
- Regression converted a press's subtle strengths into numbers the planner could compare.
- Optimization chose an order-routing strategy across the whole network, not per job.
- Simulation tested the plan under uncertainty before committing capacity.
- The result shifted policy rather than being a one-off cost study.
what transfers
In a plant network, the cheapest factory for a job is not fixed; the win is re-routing every order based on what each press is actually good at.
what came after
The study found an estimated potential annual savings of over $10 million across Standard Register's major product segments in high-volume rotary production, and it produced a strategic shift in the company's capacity-allocation policies. The executive leadership launched system-wide production-distribution improvement initiatives and accelerated building real-time supply-chain decision-support capabilities to support it.
references
- Operations Research Helps Reshape Operations Strategy at Standard Register Company
- Operations Research Helps Reshape Operations Strategy at Standard Register Company
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