The Chicagoland Roundtable of the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals (CSCMP) will be at the Paddock Printing Center, located in Schaumburg, Illinois. We have planned an approximately 75 minute tour of the facility, on Thursday, October 18th, 2007, with a dinner and networking session to follow.

The Paddock Printing Center creates approximately 160,000 Daily Herald newspapers every day, serving 17 different zones and 90 communities in the Chicagoland area. But what can supply chain professionals learn from a printing operation? The Paddock Operations teams have to manage very similar issues as any manufacturing and service-based logistics operations, including managing short order fulfillment windows, Just-In-Time inventories (daily newsworthy sections), kitting (zoned and date-specific advertising), warehousing, transportation, returns, tracking, and disaster-recovery and backup. This is a very interesting tour, and one that has application to many issues faced by Supply Chain professionals every day.

If you are interested in watching how this operation consumes 728 miles of newsprint
overnight, you must come to this tour!