Concerning How Your Mill Can Make More Money

Mr. Thompson:

You are right on with your suggestion that the paper industry should use the Internet is a more effective manner. At a tissue mill, a one mill company mostly selling on the east coast, an Internet site had never been considered to sell their products! In financial trouble, they mostly consider their customers as being in a delivery radius of the mill. There is a big world out there! Why wouldn't a company consider marketing their products to co-ops where the co-op sells the products to their members and buys a quantity that could fill a truck? What if the products were ordered on the internet and delivered by one of the package delivery companies? What if one of their drug store customers, who order in truck load lots, would also in that shipment receive an internet order placed by a customer for pickup at the neighborhood store. [The customer would likely make other purchases while at the drug store.] There are so many creative ways mills could use to expand their customer base.

Look at Walmart...an Internet order for a product, not stocked locally, will be delivered to that store for your pick up without added shipping costs.

But, then as an engineer for over 30 years, I need to be reminded to constantly look for ways to creatively supply engineering needs of our customers. There are ways being used which efficiently supply engineering requirements of the remote mills, functioning with bare bones technical staffs which, as you say, "keep the invoice printer humming" for our organization.

Tim D Nafziger PE
Greenville, South Carolina
USA