The Markens Group (TMG, Springfield, MA), consultants to the packaging industry since 1988, will hold a Machine-Hour Rates and Profit-Planning Fundamentals Workshop November 8-9, 2017 in Springfield, Massachusetts. The workshop will help folding-carton and corrugated-box converters, commercial printers, labellers and contract packaging companies create an overall financial plan for the year. It’s an ideal training course for financial executives, sales managers and cost accountants, the organizers said. “Like a financial roadmap for the year, a profit plan is a set of goals for revenue, spending and earnings that enables packaging companies to set targets, benchmark progress and ultimately stay on a path to success and increased profits.”
“It helps to think of a profit plan as a quotation for a single job the size of an entire year’s volume,” said Ben Markens, TMG President and workshop instructor. “It not only includes every cost and detail summarized on a single sheet of paper, it also guides the company’s progress along several of the most important benchmarks – like revenues and recoup of fixed expenses.” In addition to training in profit planning, workshop attendees will receive a ‘crash course’ in machine-hour rates, which are a per-hour translation of the goals established in the profit plan. Crucial to budgeting and pricing jobs, machine-hour rates reveal the true out-of-pocket hourly costs for production centers in a manufacturing facility. They can also help manufacturers determine whether an order is truly profitable, and which customers contribute most to the bottom line.
To practice, attendees will user their new knowledge of profit planning and machine-hour rates to solve a variety of complex problems for a fictitious folding-carton company. They will determine the company’s true cost of labour, construct its variable and fixed overhead budgets, establish production centers and monitor its profitability. “Operational success doesn’t happen by chance,” said Markens. “It’s the product of careful, strategic planning. I’m looking forward to teaching the basics of such planning at TMG’s upcoming workshop.” More information: https://markens.com/our-services/strategic-consulting/workshops/profit-planning/.