2001 – 2004 Enper Giftwrap
Managing Director
The Company
Enper Giftwrap is a medium-sized sales- and manufacturing company specialised in Giftwrap located in Vlaardingen next to Rotterdam port. The company’s passion is its design and its ability to truly print quality Giftwrap. One of our major clients, itself a design specialist sourcing from multiple giftwrap manufacturers, frequently told me: Enper has the best printer in the business, don’t ever lose him – and we didn’t.
The Job
As Managing Director I was obviously responsible for all aspects of the business, including design, finance, customer relations, manufacturing, etc., a very interesting but also remarkably seasonal job:
Gifts are given throughout the year, at birthdays, engagements, weddings, etc., however the real gift-giving season is December. While above mentioned events involve everybody they tend to be evenly spaced-out throughout the year. In December however both Sint Nikolaas (big in parts of Europe) and Christmas occur and both entail gifts for everybody, thus skewing year-round giving to the extreme.
Unfortunately you can’t just start printing in January and hope it will all be sold by mid-December: you cannot fathom what designs and which paper quality the buyers (of department stores, supermarkets and the like) will fancy; cash-flow implications, should you have picked the wrong ones. are enormous. Obviously you try to limit the seasonal effects through complementary wrapping paper for flowers, department stores, book jackets, etc., but these are only incidental when compared to the main article.
Thus you spent most of the beginning of the year doing very little: finding cheap supplies (overruns and the like) and fending off creditors, while during the second part, having received you first December orders, you try to squeeze every last drop of perspiration from your employees in an effort to print well above rated capacity in the most efficient way.
In the end this was not for me, I prefer to squeeze every drop of my perspiration all year round. Luckily I had, already before joining Enper, been asked to join Atlas, a request that I then had turned down, for a similar reason: the first three years Atlas really didn’t have any full-time job for a CFO, however loosely defined.
My Successes
In order to improve our printing efficiency I wrote, in Excel, an ERP system fully targeted at the peculiarities of our situation, keeping track of stocks, change-over-times, maintenance, etc. Through this system we managed to increase our efficiency / lower our working capital by 20%.
Apart from printing, the Giftwrap paper also needs to be converted in consumer-sized rolls of 2-5 meters. Obviously here too, efficiency is key: higher efficiency results in a lower need for converting machines and thus a further drop in working capital. Through a change in operating procedure (requiring more seasonal labour) I managed to a squeeze 40% higher output per machine, which not only resulted in much higher potential sales but also a per roll reduction in cost, even after including this extra labour costs,.
Lastly I actively worked with the manufacturer of the converting machines on the design of a revolutionary new incarnation: allowing a 1.40m wide 15000m long printed roll to manufacture two 70cm wide consumer-packs side-by-side. I might not have technical education, but, as the English poet William Blake said: A fool who persists in his folly will become wise.
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