Baltimore Mavens...of Print

IT STARTED in the parking lot. As he stepped out of his car one day, Greg Cooper, print shop manager for the city of Baltimore's Digital Document Division, happened to run into the city's IT director. They started talking about the checks and bills that IT was printing for the city on its Xerox 92C printers. Cooper told him, flat out, that his in-plant was better positioned to handle this work than IT, whose main focus was supposed to be computers and data.

"We're good at putting ink on paper; that's what we specialize in. So give it to the specialists," he reasoned.

His logic, though sound, didn't sway the IT director right away.

"It took a lot of convincing because a lot of people didn't think we could do it," Cooper says. Eventually, though, after upgrading his shop's Xerox DocuTech 180s to highlight color versions and putting security procedures in place, Cooper was able to bring all of Baltimore's IT printing into his in-plant. This included not only vendor checks but water bills, tax bills, ambulance bills, parking fines, reports and more. It was a major coup for the in-plant—one that improved its visibility and its importance to the city.

Since taking over IT printing, Cooper reports that jobs are now output twice as fast. And by eliminating IT's printers, the in-plant is saving the city money; manpower costs have been cut in half. Assuming responsibility for IT printing is just one of the progressive steps that Cooper has taken to bring in new work, add services and make his in-plant indispensable to the city of Baltimore.

Serving B'more With Pride

Home of the Orioles and the National Aquarium, Baltimore is a city of about 637,000 situated on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay. The in-plant is located across the street from city hall, just a few blocks from the picturesque Inner Harbor, a popular tourist attraction.

Since arriving at the in-plant in 2001—after supervising the Maryland Department of Social Services print shop and serving as a reprographic specialist in the U.S. Air Force before that—Cooper's goal has been to run the in-plant like a business, something he's been quite successful at doing so far.

"I've increased the revenue and made it a much more efficient operation," he points out. "My goal is to provide professional services quickly and cheaply to my customers."

Much of this efficiency came about after he made the decision four years ago to eliminate most of the in-plant's offset presses and enhance its digital printing capabilities. The shop, now rechristened the Digital Document Division, runs a host of Xerox equipment, including an iGen3 (installed a year ago), two DocuTech 180HLCs, a Nuvera 100 MICR printer (for check printing), a Nuvera 144 and a Nuvera 288.

To bring about nearly hands-off printing, the in-plant has installed a Lasermax Roll Systems unwinder/sheeter on the front end of its Nuvera 288 and an inline GBC Fusion Punch II at the back end. This has eliminated the bindery bottleneck that used to slow down jobs like the curriculum guides the shop prints for the city's 200 schools. It used to take two months to produce 10,000 coil-bound city directories, Cooper says; now it takes just two weeks, thanks to the inline punch.

With customers that include the police and fire departments, the mayor's office, district courts, and the city's Housing, Collections, Health, Finance and Permits departments, the in-plant keeps its digital machines pretty busy. Tax bills (which IT used to outsource) are its largest job, comprising 270,000 pieces in the summer and another 120,000 in the winter. The in-plant prints them using its Xerox 180HLC highlight color printers.

Still, Cooper is constantly on the lookout for new types of work. The shop has added services like Braille printing, document scanning, shredding and forms management, all in the name of enhancing the in-plant's value to the city.

Some opportunities have come unexpectedly. When the Department of Education endured budget cuts five years ago and planned to close its in-plant, Cooper was right there with a proposal to take over its printing.

"We've done work for them for 30-plus years," he explains, "so I didn't want to lose them as a customer."

His shop took ownership of its equipment, put two employees on site there and now handles all Department of Education printing, which amounted to more than $800,000 last year. Cooper even inked a contract with the DOE promising at least 24 million impressions a year.

"It's an additional revenue stream," he says.

High Demand for Scanning

Not all of the in-plant's new services require printing, though. A couple years ago, Cooper pitched the idea of scanning and archiving forms and architectural plans for various departments. Today scanning is a booming business for the in-plant. On a recent tour of the shop, IPG saw dozens of bags full of rolled-up architectural plans waiting to be scanned on the Océ wide-format TDS 6100. The in-plant burns these PDFs onto CDs and recycles the drawings (the in-plant is the largest recycler in the city, Cooper says). Forms are scanned with Kodak 3500 and Fujitsu fi-5650C scanners and then shredded by the in-plant.

By supplying a service like scanning, Cooper hopes to reinforce the message that "We're the document specialists; we're not just printers."

Scanning has also provided him with a marketing opportunity. On occasion, he personally delivers jobs to new customers so he can meet them and inform them about the in-plant's services. When he spots piles of paper on their desks, he tells them "you know, I could scan those files for you."

Another new business that Cooper brought in-house is forms management. For many years the in-plant simply printed the city's forms in bulk and sent them to a warehouse. To provide the city with a more cost-effective solution, he took over the entire forms distribution operation. Now the in-plant prints many of those forms on demand and delivers them to the departments that need them, along with NCR and numbered forms, which it stocks in its warehouse. It's more complicated for the in-plant this way, he concedes, but providing this service has made the in-plant indispensable to the city. The in-plant has also digitized several of the city's forms, turning them into fillable PDFs that can be accessed online.

Four-color Coming Back In-house

Since getting rid of the in-plant's multi-color offset presses four years ago, Cooper has been buying four-color work outside. Now that the shop has upgraded from a DocuColor 8000 to an iGen3, however, many short-run, four-color jobs are done in-house. These include book covers, flyers, brochures and post cards. The ability to print these four-color items quickly is a big advantage for the in-plant.

"If the mayor needs something by 3 p.m., I can't outsource it, but I can definitely run it on the iGen," Cooper notes.

The iGen3's variable data printing (VDP) capabilities have brought in new work, Cooper says. The in-plant has produced personalized recruitment materials for both the police and fire departments.

"That work is growing," remarks Cooper.

In a political environment like city government, Cooper does his best to remain apolitical and focus on providing everyone with great service. One way he hopes to improve that service even more is by upgrading from Logic shop management software to Pace (both EFI products). This will bring online job ordering to the in-plant, which Cooper is excited about. It will also improve billing, estimating, production management, inventory and data collection, making the in-plant much easier to do business with. Plus, adds Cooper, "It will really give me a better picture of what's going on."

As for the future, Cooper says he has to make sure the in-plant stays flexible enough to be able to take on any new services that come along, so that the in-plant will remain relevant and be able to continue serving the city of Baltimore.

"It you stay flexible, then you stay valuable," he observes. "I just really have to be prepared for whatever my customers need or anything the future brings up." IPG