College Shop Makes Its Move

For years, Paul Lee played what he called a game of “Frogger” whenever he left his office on the first floor of an education building at Anne Arundel Community College, in Arnold, Md.

“Getting from my office to the copy center I had to cross a hall,” says Lee, director of Document Services, “and if I did that between classes…”

Frogger ensued—that classic video game where a frog tries to cross a busy street without being squashed.

This danger aside, the in-plant’s location was less than ideal for another reason: it was in a different building than the mail center. So if jobs were finished late in the day, there was often no time to run them over to the mail center for delivery.

“We ended up having to hand deliver a lot of last-minute things,” Lee says.

That all changed recently when both the print and mail shops were moved into a brand new 35,000-square-foot building constructed to house all college facilities. The 12-employee in-plant now enjoys more than twice as much space, moving from a cramped 3,000 square feet into a roomy 6,700-square-foot area with a loading dock.

Moving the shop’s presses—which include a two-color Heidelberg MOZP, a Heidelberg GTO and a Hamada—was a big task and halted production for seven working days. But the digital printers—a Kodak 9110 and three Canons—were up and running the day after the move.

“We did not skip a beat in the copy center,” Lee boasts. Customers submitted work early so they were not impacted by the move, he says.

Lee sees the move as a sign that the college appreciates the in-plant.

“It was actually a big reassurance for me,” he says, noting that he had to submit a cost analysis ahead of time to prove the college would benefit from keeping the in-plant and paying to move it, rather than outsourcing the work. When he took the job two years ago, he admits, he was told the shop might not survive.

“I’m in the new building,” he laughs, “so something has worked out.”

Building the new structure was an adventure in itself. The college picked the site of an old barn, part of the original farm on which the college was built. Neighbors revolted—they liked that old barn, sitting incongruously in the middle of their suburban world. So the county chipped in money and the school moved the barn and two silos a few hundred feet—a major relocation project that caught the attention of The History Channel.

Having pushed that old barn aside and beaten the odds in Frogger, Lee and his crew are ready to face some new challenges. Their new home, and the morale boost it has engendered, will make that a lot easier.

“I think we have a lot of happy employees,” Lee says.