ACUP '98--A Louisville Slugger

This year's meeting was a Major League event. One of the most well-attended ACUP conferences to date, it even drew three attendees from England.

It was a conference where laughter was a scheduled event, foreign accents spiced up the air and cutthroat betting on autographed basketballs soared into the millions of dollars—all in a city known mostly for baseball bats and horse racing.

With a louder than usual roar, the annual Association of College and University Printers (ACUP) conference landed in Louisville, Ky., recently, its record 150 attendees waking up the quiet Ohio River town. Dozens of new schools were represented this year, including three English universities, whose in-plant managers fit right in with their U.S. counterparts.

Ray Chambers, assistant vice president for information technology at the University of Louisville, organized this year's event, which included a large vendor exhibit area, a "virtual" night at the horse track using videotaped races and fake money (later spent at an auction), and a gathering of top-notch industry speakers.

Get To Know Your Customer

Keith Nickoloff, president of PathForward, a management consultancy, offered managers some marketing advice gleaned from his 16 years at Eastman Kodak Office Imaging. He stressed the importance of getting to know your customers well, saying that whoever knows the customer best will win. Customers, he said, go where they're treated special, so learn their special needs, satisfy them and create customers that are so pampered no competitor would want them.

Don't stop there, though, Nickoloff said; it's just as important to go beyond the customer and get to know the receiver, the most important person in the communication process. Hold focus groups to learn what the document receiver wants in a document.

"We've got to know them better than our customers know them," he said.

To help in-plants understand their competitors' viewpoints, Nickoloff told attendees what he often tells quick printers:

• Get digital: most in-plants aren't.

• Go where the clicks are: every customer is not equal.

• Be competitively superior: the incumbent wins all ties.

• Exude great attitude: people don't want to deal with jerks.

• Sell benefits, not features: customers don't buy technology, they want to know what it will do for them.

Richard Sand, of Xerox, offered some marketing advice of his own, urging attendees to try a fresh approach.

"Become a print partner rather than just a supplier of print," he said.

Consult with customers rather than just selling to them, he said. Let them know how your services can help them do their jobs better. Stress your value-added benefits, like your ability to check for correct logos and colors. Also, sit with customers and offer technical advice, such as how to create digital files.

Better Service Via Omnisourcing

Having a strong customer focus is important, but it's also necessary to market your in-plant to your administration and to network with other university department heads. This advice came from Terry Walden, former director of mail services for Indiana University-Purdue University.

At his session, Walden stressed that managers should tell their employees how important their jobs are to the success of each project. Make sure they understand how crucial their role is.

The bulk of Walden's session concerned the concept of omnisourcing: being both a vendor and a customer by producing some work in-house and outsourcing work that is not the in-plant's specialty. Walden advised managers to put their customers' interests first and shed their traditional wariness of commercial printers—as well as their feelings of pride. When an outside vendor can do a better job, managers should look into partnering. Having such a partnership will prove invaluable if a disaster forces the in-plant to suddenly outsource all of its work.

Walden also warned in-plants that enjoy the right of first refusal on print jobs not to get too comfortable. Monopolies, he stressed, breed passivity and lower standards. Creativity and flexibility go out the window and service declines. Such in-plants should still consider omnisourcing to get the best products for their customers.

Making his first visit to ACUP, Larry Aaron, executive director of the International Publishing Management Association, pointed out the dangers of making faulty comparisons while benchmarking. Statistics, such as those compiled by Printing Industries of America or National Association of Printers and Lithographers (or even IPMA), don't necessarily define impressions or salaries in exactly the same way, making it difficult for in-plants to benchmark against these figures. Such inaccurate comparisons have been used, he pointed out, to try to close in-plants.

Copyright permission is always a big issue among university in-plants, so ACUP included a panel discussion on the topic, chaired by copyright whiz Rosemary Chase, of George Mason University. Forrest Speck, of University of Massachusetts Boston, led off the discussion by detailing a letter he had drafted and was planning to send to various publishers. The letter's purpose is to get publishers to simplify the copyright permission process and reduce fees. In return, faculty compliance would increase due to the less-expensive fees and faster processing.

Speck argued that the reprint market would expand for publishers if they made it easier on in-plants. Also, now that people have increased access to copiers, scanners and the Internet, defending against theft is becoming more difficult, and tough permission procedures are deterring people from seeking legal permission. He and Chase are currently promoting the proposal by sharing this letter with various universities around the country, trying to get a consensus.

Other panel members reported problems they often encounter in their efforts to obtain proper permission. Brenda Nelson, of the University of North Carolina Wilmington, reported that when professors wait too long to bring in their course materials and are informed that it will take a few weeks to get permission, the professors often bring that work to an off-campus quick printer who then prints without getting permission. Students are similarly using these quick printers to make multiple copies of course materials, which they then sell to classmates.

She said that when she learned that an off-campus book store was selling these illicit course packs, the in-plant asked the store to stop, and made a deal to provide the store with legal course packs—formerly only available in the campus book store.

Copyright permission must be obtained for items put on the Internet, as well, Chase stressed. A broad reading of the current fair use guidelines might allow an article to be posted without permission one time, but then it must come down. Caution must be taken before posting student papers on the Web. Not only must signed permission be obtained from the students, but their sources must be checked closely; if any of their work has been plagiarized, the university can get itself in serious trouble.

Managers, Chase urged, must pressure their upper administration to tell faculty members that the school won't support them if they make illegal copies. The penalties for such transgressions should also be stressed.

Other Sessions At ACUP

• Dr. Clifford Kuhn, the University of Louisville "Laugh Doctor," elaborated on the healing benefits of laughter, saying that it reduces stress, releases energy and boosts creativity. He recommended 30 minutes of laughter a day—not all at once.

• During a panel discussion among in-plant managers, Mike Loyd, of Louisiana State University mentioned one of the difficulties of integrating the in-plant with the Information Technology department: IT services are "funded" so they appear to be free, while the in-plant charges back. If they two were merged, IT customers would not want to start paying.

• During the same panel, Cecil Poe, of Southwest Missouri State University, said he had managed to run the campus-area Kinko's out of business by promoting his shop's services with brochures, holding sales and improving pick-up and delivery services.