Building for success

By Kevin Adshade

Safety, quality, cost, performance, and people — these are key areas of focus that operations improvement director Charles Maxner and his team continue to focus on to achieve success for Advocate Printing & Publishing.

“It’s a package deal,” says Maxner. “Sometimes you have to focus your energies on one more than the other, but each element is deserving of attention. They’re all important. We have been working with our people to collect and interpret data to help ensure we are focusing our energies appropriately. There is still a lot to be done.”

Safety, scheduling, and planning have been key areas of focus over the past year, and they will continue to be as the company moves forward. One of the challenges the organization faced post-pandemic was recruitment and retention. “To help improve this situation we have worked closely with human capital,” Maxner says. “We continue to work hard to examine our onboarding processes, our training practices, and providing better direction regarding clarity around people’s roles and responsibilities. We are starting to see the results of this focus.”

As the company moves into the new fiscal year, quality has been identified as an area of opportunity. Maxner uses the word “formality” to illustrate methods that teams can use to help reach company objectives.

“Every time we produce, we need to focus on producing to specification, producing the correct quantity and producing our product on time to meet our customers’ expectations,” he explains. “We want to create more formality around our processes and expectations to better support our teams in this quality journey.”

Pizza Day

Suddenly silver

The hard work of Advocate’s communityteam recently garnered national recognition with a pair of Canadian Community Newspaper Awards. The Pictou Advocate earned silver for Best Sports Coverage, reflecting reporter Steve Goodwin’s many stories. The Saint Croix Courier won silver for best feature, following editor Raissa Tetanish’s guidance of the newspaper through a year with several challenges.