All Printing Resources (APR) has announced that the company has formed a strategic partnership with SPL Consulting, LLC, a Wisconsin-based firm specializing in strategic planning, lean implementation and leadership development services. SPL Founder and CEO, Brian Van de Water, has spent the last three decades in the printing and packaging industries. Brian has a proven record of success in helping companies increase efficiencies, creating processes and driving company growth.

As an established industry packaging engineer, Brian has spent more than 30 years working in the flexible packaging, extrusion, lamination, and label-printing sectors. He comments, “I’m thrilled to be partnering with APR in offering printing and packaging companies programs that will have a big impact on their profitability. One of most urgent things I hear from printing companies today is that if they could find more people, they could do more work and be more profitable. Recruitment is the number one hurdle. To assist them in addressing this pain point, I help companies drastically increase process efficiencies whether it’s the sales cycle, on time delivery, accounting or production related. One of the tools I often apply to production processes is a SMED (single minute exchange of die) Kaizen designed for set up time reduction. I have routinely seen decreases of 30-50% resulting from a single Kaizen. This results in increased capacity without having to increase headcount on the production floor.”

As our industry continues to search for ways to address the mounting workforce development crisis, companies are turning to process and best-practice partners to assist them in taking a close look at areas where lean process and Kaizen can be implemented. Dave Nieman, APR president and CEO, comments, “I see a real need for SPL’s services in the marketplace. My team is interacting with printers and converters every day. We see these companies struggle with recruitment and expansion in what is currently a very unforgiving job market. Brian’s program gives companies alternate ways to increase capacity organically and he is able to achieve very impressive results at his client sites.”