Irish Examiner
Irish Examiner Lean Business Case Studies
The Irish Examiner, formerly The Cork Examiner and then The Examiner, is an Irish national daily newspaper. Primarily, the newspaper circulates in the Munster region surrounding its base in Cork, though it is available throughout the country. The newsroom has pivoted to digital, with a majority of their stories breaking online first. As a result, they have seen a significant surge in their online and mobile readership.
It was founded in 1841 and is owned by the Irish Times. The latest Joint National Readership Survey, compiled by NewsBrands Ireland, shows the Irish Examiner attracted an additional 13,000 daily readers over the past year. Most importantly, this has resulted in an overall readership of 236,000.
The Irish Examiner is a different and distinct voice in the national discourse, highlighting stories and perspectives not found elsewhere.
Lean Project Objectives
The Irish Examiner first engaged with Lean Teams in 2013 and we have collaborated with them since then through our Lean Essentials online training programme. Their employees identified a number of process improvements that could be made within their own work area. A brief outline of 3 of these Lean projects is described below. You can also read the full case studies below. You may also be interested in our other case studies.
Case Study 1
Lost Production
This first Lean project was pinpointed by an employee at the Irish Examiner. As they were implementing a new media publishing system, they discovered that they spoke “different languages”. Consequently, this led to a large volume of lost production time. The company design pages based on requested article lengths. These can be in inches, paragraph lengths or words. None of them are incorrect. But without a common standard, this is open to large variances. Read the full case study here.
Case Study 2
Lean Wastes
Another employee identified this second Lean project. The Advertisement Production Department is responsible for the design and production of all advertisements for the Irish Examiner. However, since a new advertising system was introduced, processing time for content arriving via email increased significantly. This represented a substantial waste on labour and associated costs. Read the full case study here.
Case Study 3
Purchase Orders
Our final case study relates to their Purchase Order System. Another employee saw an opportunity to make improvements within his own work area. He saw that the current Purchase Order System was not user-friendly. Furthermore, there were lots of delays between activities. So, they were wasting time waiting for confirmation of completed actions. This resulted in an unnecessary workload for managers and staff members. Read the full case study here.
“The principles of Lean are deceptively simple. So simple that their potential benefit, when applied to any organisation can be underestimated. Learning about Lean helps any organisation to identity value-adding opportunities. The ways of reducing “waste” can then be addressed by means of practical, customised mentoring sessions.
The trainers and mentors bring a wealth of business acumen and experience of successful Lean initiatives. In short, Lean works and it has universal application in any work environment where people want to add or create value.”
