Prescription For Success

TONY CAROSI caught the printing bug at an early age. Now the director of Print Operations for CVS/pharmacy, the Woonsocket, R.I.-based pharmacy, health and beauty aids giant, Carosi recalls a mandatory graphic arts class turning into a life-long love of the printing industry.

"I was 12 years old, in junior high school, and started printing using letterpress," Carosi says. "What I found intriguing by that was you could set up a job, print it, break it down, and then start all over again for the next job."

Carosi, a Rhode Island native, continued taking graphic arts classes through high school. He took a job at Coronet Thermogravers Inc., in Providence, R.I., and ended up staying there for 15 years, honing his craft and gaining valuable industry experience.

A 25-year veteran of the in-plant world, Carosi started out at CVS as a printing supervisor. It didn't take him long to realize he had made the right decision by joining the company's print facility.

"It was like I died and went to heaven," Carosi exclaims, conceding that the business world operated differently back then. "I remember sitting in my first budget meeting and my boss asked me what I needed to run the facility for the next year. I told him, and he gave me what I wanted."

Open Communication is Key

Of course, most in-plants are no longer managed this way, and CVS is no exception. The facility now handles printing for more than 7,000 stores, running 12 hours a day in split shifts. Carosi has found that open communication has been the key to successfully running a 70-employee, 50,000-square-foot in-plant printing facility for a Fortune 20 company.

"What I started doing about 22 years ago was to try and make the organization understand what we could do for them," Carosi notes. "Everything we do, I convert to an 8½x11˝ sheet of paper. So when I am communicating to the organization, I am telling them what we printed based on that concept."

Building the facility's overhead costs into the equation, Carosi boils everything the in-plant produces down to equaling 8.2 cents per page. In 2008, the facility printed more than 275 million 8½x11˝ sheets.

"That way it is very simple—it's simple math," Carosi says. "You see what your expenses are for the year, you divide it by the number of 8½x11˝ sheets, and that is something the organization can understand."

Justifying the In-plant

During a period in the 1990s, Carosi learned that providing details is crucial when the in-plant faced the possibility of its work being outsourced. His hard work paid off when the company decided to keep the facility operating.

"About six to eight months of my life during those years were spent justifying to the organization the value that we bring," Carosi points out. "My argument was, on the outside, if I am paying a penny for a piece of paper, and they are paying a penny for a piece of paper, they are not going to sell that to me for a penny. They need to make a profit. When I am printing a job, I am doing it at cost. There is no mark-up."

Every month Carosi produces a "Print Financial and Operating Report" for the company's senior level managers. The report explains what the facility's costs are, and helps to justify bringing in new equipment and adding labor.

The CVS in-plant uses a mix of digital and offset equipment to produce a variety of point-of-sale signs, brochures, forms, rain checks and pharmacy materials. It boasts an army of seven Xerox iGen digital color presses—including a new iGen4—to produce short-run, personalized jobs. On the offset side, four Ryobi sheetfed presses, a two-color Didde web, a four-color Didde UV web, and an eight-color Sanden UV web press handle long-run jobs.

"The print runs dictate where we go with the job," Carosi notes. "Anything over 1,000 impressions will go offset, unless it is a variable data job."

Carosi's accomplishments extend outside the in-plant. He proudly points out that he is the father of two grown sons, and has been married for 37 years.

"That is a success in itself," he says with a laugh. IPG