We humans often defy the natural order of things…printers and publishers to the extreme.

Most of the natural world hibernates in the winter, having prepared and stored sustenance during the warm months. The summer is a season of freneticism and gorging, rummaging for food, squirreling away resources, and fattening up. As the days grow shorter, biology helps by shutting down the metabolism and sending creatures into a deep sleep during which their need for resources becomes negligible. The whole point, as we all learned in middle school science class, is to sandbag for the harsh winter months and to awaken in the spring healthy and prepared for growth and progress.

The printing and publishing business has this backwards. We seem to hibernate during the summer months. As school lets out, families turn their attention to the lake, the beach, summer camps, vacations, and other leisurely pursuits. This is especially true for those of us in northern climes where the summer is woefully short. Page counts dwindle, the summer issues are combined or dropped, the catalog is postponed, and other work gets tabled in lieu of that all-important round of golf. We slow down here at Lane as well, with ebbing printing demands and our own vacations. I suppose it’s our way of preparing for the growth and progress we know will come when everyone wakes up after Labor Day.

We also take the summer to do a bit of our own sandbagging in preparation for fall’s flood. At Lane Press, summer is a time for preventative maintenance, training, technology implementation, and the introduction of new processes. This summer, we undertook a landmark project to move the plant to seven-day operations. This change included the introduction of 12-hour shifts for several of our departments. For 104 years, we have scheduled the plant for eight-hour shifts, five days a week. However, the growth of our business requires additional capacity, especially in the fall and early winter. The switch was thrown in July–typically our quietest month. Despite the magnitude of this change, we trust that it was transparent to you. We’re confident it will improve our ability to meet your needs when things get particularly busy in the coming months.

You can help your fellow Lane Press customers and us by taking time to prepare for fall’s re-awakening. Now is a good time to shore up operations, adopt new technology, modernize workflow, firm-up schedules, and communicate your intentions to us as we ramp up for the next few months. We are expecting a very busy fall and winter. Clean operations, timely communication, process standardization, and schedule fidelity help reduce surprises and the chaos they can create.

Nature knows the importance of preparation. So do we, even if we might get it backwards.