Allstate - In Good Hands

As the largest insurance in-plant in the country, the Allstate Print Communications Center uses cutting-edge technology to provide unrivaled service.

"You're in good hands." That's what Allstate Insurance tells its customers to reassure them that the company is looking out for their best interests.

It's also what the Allstate Print Communications Center believes describes its relationship with its parent company. After all, in addition to both offset printing and digital black-and-white and color printing, the in-plant offers ink-jet addressing, mail processing, billing statement output, electronic prepress, bindery, distribution and more to support Allstate and its commerical business for external customers.

Just about the only thing the operation doesn't handle are satellite copy centers. That's simply because its data center and distributed printing network are so effective at getting work where it needs to go.

The Allstate Print Communications Center is a shining example of a successful in-plant. Located in the Chicago suburb of Wheeling, it has won six consecutive Gold Awards from the National Association for Printing Leadership and was named In-Plant Graphics Industry Leader of the Year in 1998. With more than 300 full-time employees and a $100 million budget, it is the largest insurance company in-plant in the country, according to the IPG Top 50, and ranks second overall behind the U.S. Government Printing Office.

The accolades are sure to continue with all the advances in technology that Bob Tierney, Allstate's print communication director, has been implementing.

"We've had electronic prepress for the better part of 10 years, but the computer-to-plate technology is our current prepress platform," he says, speaking of the Center's new Heidelberg/Creo direct-to-press system. With it came complete digital proofing.

That CTP system, along with a new fully loaded, 40˝ five-color Komori Lithrone perfector with an in-line coater, will allow printing directly from computer to 40˝ metal plates. Computer-to-plate is a natural step since the Center already receives all its jobs electronically, whether through the Internet, the company intranet or the Macintosh network.

"It's a major improvement on costs and time because it gets us to press quicker," says Tierney, "and the quality is enhanced because you're always working with first-generation files. Plus it makes us more competitive."

Though Tierney says the in-plant will continue to invest in digital equipment, other areas, like the bindery, aren't being neglected. For example, the Center recently added a Heidelberg stitcher, two Heidelberg/Polar cutters, two MBO folders and a Heidelberg perfect binder.

The new equipment, in addition to corporate acquisitions, helped the Center reach a landmark 960 million sheets printed in 2000. Roughly 70 percent of that volume is color work, in the form of either two-color pieces used internally or high-quality, four-color sales and incentive literature for Allstate sales agents.

The Allstate Print Communications Center also does variable color printing on a Xerox 2060 and an Indigo E-Print 1000 to personalize work for both internal Allstate departments and outside commercial markets.

Working From The Outside In

Twenty million sheets—a mere two percent of the Center's total print volume—resulted from insourcing last year. But that two percent translates into $2 million in sales.

"We have two account representatives [who] have increased our exposure in the commercial marketplace," says Tierney, "and we'll continue to pursue growth in our commercial business. It's a significant revenue generator for us."

When hunting for insourcing work, Tierney says that the account reps try to focus on digital jobs because of the strength of the in-plant's 13 Xerox DocuTechs. But the in-plant is open to any kind of work, whether Web, bindery, prepress or design.

"We also think we're an outstanding sheetfed operation, so we send our salesmen out there to generate sheet-fed work," he says.

Home-grown E-commerce Solution

The drive for more insourcing has led the Allstate Print Communications Center to test out some of the e-commerce print applications, including Noosh and printCafe. While the tests worked out fine, Tierney says that online job management is something the in-plant will keep in-house for the time being.

"We built our own intranet and our own processes where work travels, where information is available, where data for purchasing agents to deal with us is already in place," he notes. "We wouldn't buy another system to replace an existing system that works effectively, that was custom-designed by our data center employees."

Tierney says the current system provides complete job tracking—from prepress to distribution, including information about job costs and functions—all over the company's intranet.

Outside e-commerce applications could serve a purpose in the future, though, so Tierney wants to learn what he can about them and keep his options open.

"As we grow our commercial business, if we have key accounts who want that kind of flexibility, who deal with those types of vendors as they deal with their print network, we want to be able to provide [those services]."

This is assuming, of course, that these services still exist in the future.

"The flood of dotcoms in the print industry has declined," declares Tierney. "The promise of interaction was greater than the actual result has been. I think the nature of the investments—the paradigm shift that has to take place—is not going to happen as quickly as the dotcoms thought it would."

Charging Back In The Future

One area where Tierney is looking to make more immediate changes is in justifying his operation's worth to the parent company by increasing the company's understanding of the economics of printing.

"We very much communicate what we save and how much it costs and so forth [through] a chargeback system where we allocate back to major departments," he says. "We're going to improve upon that in 2001 and come up with an even more direct chargeback from the standpoint of providing increased information for our customers."

By using a direct chargeback, each customer and the corporation as a whole will better understand a print project's total impact—rather than just the creative and printing costs.

"We're going to add the paper costs, the shipping costs—all those types of figures in there," says Tierney. "I think it's going to be an eye-opener for our corporation to give them more information on what printing expenses are to the total organization. Direct chargeback is going to have a big impact, and it's just one part of remaining successful."