Adding services gives your in-plant more opportunities to make customers happy, improve your reputation and strengthen your position in the organization.

By Bob Neubauer

Carving a Niche

Several in-plants have added engraving to their repertoires and are etching signs, desk plates, plaques and many other items. University of Oklahoma Printing, Mailing and Document Services added a laser engraver and Administrator John Sarantakos says it opened up a whole new market.

“Now we can do wood plaques, trophies, pens, glass and much more,” he says.

In Dallas, Pa., Misericordia University Print and Mail Services purchased a Gravograph IS8000 XP engraver and got right to work making ADA-compliant room signage complete with raised letters and Braille. The signs have gone into classrooms, rest rooms, labs, parking lots, podiums and more.

“Signage was getting very expensive, and there was no consistency,” explains Manager Jim Sabulski. “The signs we are making now are of a better quality than many that we were paying for, and costing us less money.”

When signs are needed quickly for university events, the in-plant can turn them around faster than any outside vendor, Sabulski says.

Allan Hancock College, in Santa Maria, Calif., added an Epilog Legend 36EXT laser engraver last year after the school’s IT department bought it for etching security information on laptops, but didn’t have a place to put it.

“I said, ‘If you put it in my shop and we have access to it for commercial use, we’ll take it,’ ” says Gordon Rivera, coordinator of Campus Graphics. He has so far managed to keep the engraver pretty busy.

“We’ve done quite a bit of etching on wine glasses,” he says. The shop has also engraved some signs, a customized game board and mobile devices. Rivera sees a lot of future business coming from students wanting to etch their names onto their devices.

“We haven’t even touched the surface as far as marketing it,” he says.

It wasn't exactly his forte, but just the same, Alvin Griffin hated to see so much of his school district's money being spent to print T-shirts.

"Last summer we outsourced probably about 1,500 shirts," says the director of Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools' Graphic Production Center. At about $12 each, this was a big expense for the Charlotte, N.C., school district. Griffin didn't know much about shirts, but he did know how to save the district money on its print costs. He'd been doing it for years. Why not take on garment printing too?

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Bob Neubauer Author's page

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.

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