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# TTW Composing Costs — Recommendation

**Situation:** Composition is TTW's largest production cost — roughly 40% of hardback cost and 50-55% of paperback cost — and TTW knows it is uncompetitive on simple work.

**Complication:** No one yet knows whether composing costs are actually excessive, or what to do about it if they are.

**Answer:** TTW can very likely cut composing cost by 10% or more, through two separate tests: simplifying the process for inexpensive titles, and raising compositor productivity.

## 1. Simplify the process for inexpensive titles

- Every title — a complex reference book or a simple novel — passes through the same quality-control stages today.
- Testing fewer or differently timed checks on selected simple jobs, and measuring the effect on quality and customer acceptance, should show whether this step can be cut safely.
- Potential saving: roughly 10% of total composing cost.

## 2. Raise compositor productivity

- TTW's measured productivity trails the industry benchmark by 20-50%.
- A methods study of the composing method itself — not the checking stages — should identify where that gap can be closed.
- This is a separate line of improvement from the quality-control test above, and should be run in parallel, not folded into it.

## Why act now

- The composing department is overloaded, and manual composition is the tightest capacity constraint.
- TTW pays below local market compositor rates, has just lost two compositors, and is running most jobs late; overtime is already more than 50% over budget.
- Every week without action adds to the backlog these two tests are meant to relieve.

## What I need now

Sign-off to run both tests — the quality-control simplification trial and the productivity/methods study — with George Kennedy as the point of contact in Aylesbury for both.

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**Omitted from this note, and why:**
- A comparison of composing costs against three other printers — dropped because it does not bear on the recommendation and, in the source material, was itself flagged as unlikely to settle the question.
- The names of everyone interviewed, and the union's pending wage claim — background to how the finding was reached, not part of what the reader needs to decide.
- The observation that managers in Aylesbury disagree about whether costs are high — superseded by the recommendation itself: the two tests are the way to find out.