From the Editor: A Southern Reunion
FOR YEARS, Southern in-plant managers have been inviting me to the Southeastern University Printing and Digital Managers Conference (SUPDMC). As the name implies, this is a group of in-plant managers who hail mostly from Southern states. They have been meeting annually since 1976. I did go to SUPDMC once, back in 1998, when it was hosted by Auburn University. But in the years since then, I've never been able to manage a return appearance, with so many other things going on in the fall.
But this year I made it. I joined about 30 managers for a very well-organized and informative event in Nashville. Though the sessions were great, the conversations were what I most enjoyed. I talked with just about every attendee at some point, learning about their in-plants and some of the issues they're facing back home.
I've known several of the attendees for many years. Others I met for the first time in Nashville, like Mike Ford of Kilgore College, whose shop down in Kilgore, Texas, just installed a Konica Minolta bizhub C8000 and went all digital (see story). And Steve Hagen, from Northern Arizona University, who put in a PSI 3655 digital envelope press just a few months ago.
For a few hours one day, all of us toured the large 30-employee in-plant at Vanderbilt University. Four- and six-color Heidelberg offset presses were cranking out color work as we meandered around the facility. The in-plant has been so busy in the past few years, said Director Tom Fox, that he's had to add five people to his staff. Now that's a story I like to hear.
Vanderbilt wasn't the only busy in-plant I heard about while at SUPDMC. Bill May, director of Printing Services at the University of Alabama, told me that his shop has also been extremely busy lately. Like Vanderbilt, the Crimson Tide's in-plant has strong multi-color offset capabilities and prints a lot of recruitment materials.
Just two weeks after SUPDMC, about 50 in-house print and mail managers met in Fort Worth, Texas, for the TACUP/SWACUMS conference. Though I didn't attend, I heard there was a lot of discussion about how to get senior management to better understand the value that in-plants provide. One tool to help with this is a brand new InfoTrends white paper, sponsored by Xerox, and directed at senior management.
I just read the 20-page report ("The Strategic Value of an In-House Printing Operation"), which does a good job of pointing out some things organizations often forget about when considering outsourcing (e.g., the increasing use of networked printers for production jobs once the in-plant is gone, and the fact that staff will still be needed to oversee the outsourcing firm).
One point made repeatedly in the paper is that in-plants understand their internal customers' needs very well, and they exist only to meet those needs. This is invaluable, as it improves the organization's overall efficiency. Communicating this value should be one of every in-plant's top priorities.
- Companies:
- Heidelberg
- Xerox Corp.
Bob has served as editor of In-plant Impressions since October of 1994. Prior to that he served for three years as managing editor of Printing Impressions, a commercial printing publication. Mr. Neubauer is very active in the U.S. in-plant industry. He attends all the major in-plant conferences and has visited more than 180 in-plant operations around the world. He has given presentations to numerous in-plant groups in the U.S., Canada and Australia, including the Association of College and University Printers and the In-plant Printing and Mailing Association. He also coordinates the annual In-Print contest, co-sponsored by IPMA and In-plant Impressions.
