Edwards Brothers Malloy is a digital and offset book manufacturing company. The company has three procedures to help their clients printing books: Electronic Data Interface, One Touch Reprint, and manual entry. The manual entry process mainly relies on people working on the orders manually, as customer service representatives interact with clients, Digital Entry workers receive orders from Customer Service Representatives and putting jobs in the system. Prepress operators pre-check the formats of the files to send them to Production. The other two procedures are mainly conducted on digital systems, which allow users to place orders and get their books printed and shipped quickly.
With a team of three other students, we were tasked with helping find bottlenecks in the book production process and present solutions to alleviate these bottle necks.
My team first met with the executives to learn more about their printing processes. We then conducted contextual inquiry interviews with employees to obtain data about their role and processes in the book production cycle. Once our data collection was complete, we mapped out the product workflow as told by the employees interviewed. An affinity wall was created in aiding our analysis of the workflow to find bottlenecks.
When our analysis was complete, we presented a list of bottlenecks and recommendations to alleviate the bottlenecks.
