Goss Graphic Systems Inc. is one of the oldest and largest press manufacturers in the United States.

The company experienced a large amount of turmoil and financial problems in the latter half of the 1990s. While the company has been on a financial upswing since emerging from bankruptcy in late 1999, it still had to close a manufacturing plant and lay off numerous employees.

Major changes have occurred at Goss in 2001, including a reorganization and the installation of Richard Sutis as the company’s new president after the retirement of James Sheehan, as well as the creation of a three-man office of the chief executive.

Richard Sutis

Newspapers & Technology recently talked with Sutis, who has worked with Goss for 36 years, about the changes at Goss and the company’s goals and focus for the future.

Explain the organizational changes 
Goss has made recently.

Goss Chairman Jim Sheehan recently went into a planned retirement. Tom Cochill, one of the current members of the board long involved in the printing industry, has been elected the new chairman.

The executive responsibilities of the Goss business were transferred to the office of the chief executive with myself as president, Matt Cribari as chief operating officer and Joe Gaynor as chief financial officer.

Why a three-man office of the CEO?

The business decisions will now be made by the senior executives, working as a team. Each has deep, functional knowledge and ability. The combination of this sales, technology, service, manufacturing and finance experience in a single office makes for fast, well-structured and valid decisions.

During 2000 and 2001, we have moved to worldwide business planning. Global facilities and capabilities, such as design, operate now on a worldwide team basis. Goss can flex our global strengths and the decision path is short.

What are the goals of the company?

With a focus on basic customer satisfaction, our business is to service our customers with good products and services.

We have a large installed base, therefore, it is important that we work closely with these customers to satisfy their needs, as well as working with new customers. The new organization places more power in the hands of our representatives actually servicing the customer, as well as insuring our representatives are experienced and well trained in their role.

We are expanding our service role worldwide. Our technology and engineering (services) have worldwide capability. Both of these key customer-related positions are run by very experienced, industry-known experts and outstanding leaders are on staff in each region of the world.

Our sales organizations report centrally with well-known experts in all world regional areas. Manufacturing and finance have very short lines of communication and, thus, the entire international team can work with speed and accuracy to changing market conditions and customer needs. The local sales experts tailor the application to the different needs of each market and draw upon Goss global business units to satisfy the marketplace demands.

What is the key goal in the United States?

We have worked and continue to work on improving customer satisfaction in the [United States]. We’ve recently had a number of successful new launch and color expansion projects for national and regional papers.

Our next step is to achieve the same level of on-schedule performance in America that we achieve elsewhere in the world. We are in the process of finishing several large systems in the [United States], all of which will be excellent facilities.

What are your goals over the next five years?

The newspaper industry, indeed the entire media industry, is undergoing a huge transformation in their business model.

Our customers are facing a tougher environment than they have in the past with new competitors to print and tighter margins on print. But at the same time, newspapers are seeing new opportunities for revenue and profit growth. Our customers are transforming the way they do business and challenging us to help them. One example is the desire to print local advertising inserts. Another is combining production sites for several papers.

To help our customers during this time, we have to do two things well — anticipate and react. We need the foresight and knowledge to anticipate where our customers are going and what we can offer to help them. We also need to focus our organization so that it is flexible enough to react quickly once we determine the need, and skillful enough to meet the need and deliver on schedule.

Examples are our Uniliner press with both newspaper and commercial units, our Universal series with mixed heatset and coldset webs and our Magnum presses running into Universal folders for 48-page products on a single-width press. Another example is delivering a national newspaper expansion project six months earlier than the contract-specified date.

What is the biggest challenge Goss is facing in the United States?

One key focus in the United States is to help our customers get the most out of their existing presses.

With the economic slowdown, we’ve seen a big cutback on capital expenditures. Many customers are putting off major equipment purchases. Instead, they’re trying to improve their existing machines and print better quality with higher productivity.

One design challenge this presents to a press manufacturer is how we can adapt our newer technologies to a press that was designed and installed 10, 15 or 20 years ago. Over the last few years, we’ve put a major emphasis on offering press enhancements, such as digital inker retrofits and control console upgrades, that help our customers get more productivity out of their existing machines. We also can rearrange existing presses and add new color towers for back-to-back color printing, or install balloon formers for six sections of straight printing, if needed.

Finally, new presses equipped with the highest technology are achieving excellent color, low waste and high productivity. We have several new models that reduce the complexity for the customer in both operation and maintenance.

What is your biggest challenge 
outside the United States?

Overseas, we have been extremely successful with products from all of our factories in virtually all markets.

One reason is the design of facilities and integration of all the technologies is done jointly with the customer’s technical director and our staff. On other projects, we have provided a technical director to the customer six months prior to the delivery to work out all prepress and postpress issues, as well as the actual press preparations. With good products, good prices, good performance and on-schedule production, our overseas operations are doing well.

Many newspapers prefer to work with as few vendors as possible. Is Goss doing anything to offer them a more complete product?

Goss does offer a very complete press system with virtually any feature needed. However, in North America we no longer offer prepress and mailroom systems made by Goss or a Goss subsidiary as we did in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s.

The double-width marketplace in the [United States] has a wide variety of needs and constantly purchases new technology. Customers prefer to purchase islands of optimization as these peripheral systems have a shorter useful life, and the customer base wants a wide variety of vendors instead of a single source for press, prepress and mailroom.

Do you think newspaper consolidation has changed the way newspapers buy presses? If so, what adjustments is Goss making in regards to the changing face of print media in the United States?

The U.S. market has slowed from 2000 — some newspapers are postponing decisions, some commercial customers are delaying purchases.

The likely reason is that public ownership and share price pressures driven by higher paper prices and less advertising cause a reduction in capital investment. Another reason is profit maximization when print orders decline as part of the business cycle.

Other customers see this as a good opportunity to invest so that as they come out of a slow economic period, they will be well equipped to capture color advertising and provide special features, sections and regional commercial work. Some of these customers are also changing the format in the market to shorter cutoff sizes with various fold options. This creates some very interesting catalog-like products.

Many customers realize the Internet is a companion tool and offer it as a multimedia purchase, and some of the large expenditures in Internet activities are making their way back into printing equipment. Print still gives a solid return on sales and total print continues to grow worldwide. The long run view encourages investment.

The world market continues to be good, but is selective. While the [U.S.] economy affects the entire world, many global customers look at a continuing long-term investment program. Many global customers are privately owned and not encumbered by short-term issues, but rather make selective investments in higher productivity, efficiency and more colorful products in new formats.

Paper prices are an issue, but new mills are starting up in China, and Russian paper is making its way to the world market. However, overseas, most publications charge a higher price for their product and do not subsidize the circulation base with advertising revenue. Those newspapers that do subsidize the reader, have stronger reactions to paper prices than those who have established a higher pricing threshold in the market.

In many places in the world, readers gladly pay a good price for a good, well-printed product with interesting content. Print is still a great entertainment product and less expensive to the consumer than the Internet, cable, movie rental, satellite; in fact, almost any other medium except free television.

What trends do you see in the newspaper press market? What works best? Why?

We are introducing several new products for the newspaper and commercial industry in the coming months. Some are pending sale and will be announced shortly.

All of the machines are focused on using generally accepted offset lithography components together with conservative, robust machine design practices.

The customer will have a simple-to-operate machine that is efficient, prints very well, and allows cost saving formats without the need for special consumables.

We have done some interesting things to help the customer base. We invented a device that allows a customer to have multiple doubletruck positions in a single section. We have also retrofitted a good many digital ink systems to our customer’s existing presses, allowing them very accurate presets. We have updated control systems using the latest PC technology.

Goss still demonstrates and refines the technologies in the Adopt concept press, which, as you recall, was shown with gapless, gearless, single-fluid, direct-to-cylinder imaging, and cantilevered cylinder technologies. The direct-to-cylinder imaging is currently limited to sheetfed market applications, but the other technologies are gaining more acceptance in the marketplace. Other alternate technical solutions are proposed by others, but these five concepts still drive press development.