Linardatos Publishers: where MERA started

In 2008 Emmanuel was running operations at the family business while Greece was entering the worst crisis of its modern history. Linardatos Publishers makes diaries, calendars and stationery, and supplies corporate gifts. It had around 20 people, and the work ran the way it always had.

Preparing a new range of diaries and calendars meant months of compiling data and laying out pages before anything reached print. In the fulfilment facility, picking errors and wasted movement added cost to every order, and the business was fulfilling around eight orders a day. The question was how to do more with the same team, without asking people to work longer for less.

We rebuilt the whole operating model, using all four steps of the method Emmanuel now calls MERA: Map, Eliminate, Redesign, Automate. It also spells μέρα, the Greek for "day", which is what the method returns.

• Editorial and pre-press. A Greek diary or calendar carries far more than dates. It includes the name days of the Orthodox Church, supplied by the Archdiocese of Athens, and the moon phases and sunrise and sunset times, supplied by the National Observatory of Athens. We mapped how that data moved from its sources to print-ready files, removed the steps that added nothing and redesigned the rest. Then we automated it. A program takes in the data from both sources, cleans and transforms it, and combines it into a single structured file that feeds Adobe InDesign, which lays out the diary and calendar pages. That is what took pre-press from months to days.
• Fulfilment. We restructured the fulfilment facility around the flow of orders, reorganising the layout and the pick-and-pack process to reduce picking errors and wasted movement.
• Dispatch. We built a dispatch and delivery planning system with a planning algorithm at its core. It drew up the dispatch schedule, deciding when each order should ship by working back from the customer's required delivery date and consolidating orders bound for the same area into a single load. It then optimised the route for the company's own vans, sequencing the drops into the shortest practical run. The team worked from one board showing every order, its cartons and its carrier, and a weekly planner balanced the own fleet against outside carriers.
• New revenue. With editorial and logistics no longer the bottleneck, the business had capacity to spare. Other publishers began outsourcing their editorial and production work to Linardatos Publishers, a new revenue stream delivered by the same team.
• People. The time the changes freed went back to the team as shorter hours, with pay untouched.

Emmanuel has been involved in the business ever since, and still is today.

Over two years, measured against the baseline before the change:

• Pre-press for a new range fell from months to days.
• Editorial costs fell by 75%.
• Logistics costs fell by 23%.
• Orders fulfilled per day went from 8 to 30.
• Revenue grew by 40% in a year.
• A new revenue stream: editorial and production services for other publishers.
• Each person got 6 hours a week back, at the same pay.

Just as important, people pulled together because the benefits were shared. That is why we still offer every client the option to share the gain with the team. The choice is theirs.