Xerox turned OR into a lean printing service worth $200M

The US printing industry is a $100 billion market, and most of its shops and document-manufacturing facilities were too small to hire the analytical talent that large manufacturers use.

Xerox invented LDP Lean Document Production, a class of operations-research-based productivity offerings, and implemented it in approximately 100 sites. The tools attacked the work that dominates print economics: how work is measured, balanced, and scheduled through the shop.

The results were measured in revenue-per-unit labor cost, which fell 20-40 percent at the sites. Since 2000 the offerings generated roughly $200 million of incremental profit across the customer value chain, and Xerox extended OR to small and medium print shops it had never reached.

Package OR as a measurable lean service

OR was packaged into a service a small shop could buy

Measured outcomes made the value legible to clients

The upside was shared across the customer value chain

Patents protected a repeatable methodology

A scarce analytical skill becomes buyable when it is packaged as a repeatable service with measured outcomes; the vendor wins by sharing the client's productivity gain rather than selling hours.

Xerox was named a 2008 Franz Edelman Award finalist; INFORMS cited about $200 million of impact on Xerox profits from LDP utilization. Xerox filed 48 patents on the methodology, 11 of which had issued by early 2008.