An Eye for Adaptation

For about 15 years, a mixture of fluorescent lighting, natural light and diffused sunlight illuminated the Printing Services facility at California State University, San Bernardino (CSUSB).

It was an improvement over the basement that previously housed the department, but when Manager Laura Sicklesteel received a new set of Pantone Matching System books, she experienced an eye-opening discovery. In the back of the book, there were two swatches that, when viewed under optimum 5,000 K lighting, should have been identical; however, under substandard lighting, the colors were clearly different.

This discovery, combined with the addition of a new X-Rite IntelliTrax auto scanning system and spectrophotometer for the shop's four-color Heidelberg Printmaster PM-52 press last April, led to a complete overhaul of the in-plant's lighting.

Representatives from Heidelberg visited the in-plant in June and assisted with the G7 calibration process. They recommended 5,000 K lighting at least in the viewing booth at the end of the press. Last summer, the in-plant went a step further and had all of the lights in the production facility transitioned to LED 5,000 K, sparking improvements both in print quality and in the in-plant's energy efficiency.

To get started, only a few fixtures in the paper storage area were tested, and Sicklesteel says the staff was taken aback by how bright their workspace became. But it didn't take long to realize the benefits.

"After about a week we realized, 'wait a minute, we can now actually see what we're doing,' " Sicklesteel remarks. " 'We can see better, we can work better.' We didn't hesitate to go ahead with the rest of the plant. It was about $14,000 worth of fixtures to do the entire plant, but at the end of the day our eyes aren't as tired, our product looks better and our color management is far more consistent than it's ever been."

Embracing the Past, Eyeing the Future

Improving and upgrading technology is nothing new for the eight-employee in-plant, which lies about an hour east of downtown Los Angeles, in the foothills of the scenic San Bernardino Mountains. But as services like shredding and wide-format printing have been added and expanded to better serve the needs of the university, Printing Services still values its offset capabilities.

After starting her career in commercial printing and prepress, Sicklesteel has been manager of CSUSB Printing Services for 10 years and served as a supervisor for 15 years prior to that. Because she and her staff are trained and skilled in producing offset work, she says that has factored into the decision to keep running the four-color Heidelberg press, a two-color Heidelberg Quickmaster QM-46, a two-color Ryobi 3302 and a two-color Halm Super Jet Plus envelope press.

"I think that's why we still have a wide variety of options and still have offset," Sicklesteel explains. "We have the skill set to be able to support those."

But the in-plant is hardly stuck in the past. Sicklesteel says she routinely considers new equipment or capabilities Printing Services can add to make it an even better provider to the university.

Shredding Success

One addition came about 41⁄2 years ago when Sicklesteel learned the university was outsourcing approximately $40,000 in shredding services annually. Seeing an opportunity to save substantial money, Sicklesteel and her staff began researching the various laws and regulations pertaining to document shredding.

After determining that taking over shredding services for the campus was something the in-plant could handle, Printing Services acquired an MBM Destroyit 5009 shredder.

Now, Sicklesteel says, the campus's documents are destroyed in a highly secure environment at a fraction of the cost.

"The one person that I hired is fingerprinted, and I'm fingerprinted, so there are only two of us that are actually touching the documents," she says. "We have an internal auditor here on campus, so at the end of one year of the program we volunteered to have ourselves undergo an internal audit and it passed with flying colors."

In addition to the cost savings, Sicklesteel says bringing shredding in-house has kept the shredding vendors' vehicles from driving on campus and blocking pedestrian passageways.

Testing New Technology

While adding shredding was a value-add outside the realm of printing, Sicklesteel says new digital technology will soon be on its way to the pressroom. So far, Printing Services has tested out the Xerox Versant 2100 press and had also planned to take a look at the Ricoh Pro C7100x and equipment from Konica Minolta. Currently, the in-plant has two Xerox DocuColor 252 printers, and Sicklesteel says the new digital equipment will replace either one or both of them.

Being a chargeback facility, Sicklesteel says, helps the in-plant have the available funds to keep up with new technology. Instead of running on an operating budget, the university pays for six of the in-plant's eight salary and benefit packages, its utilities and facilities. She explains that all of the money that gets charged back enters a trust fund, so the more the in-plant prints, the more that fund is replenished, allowing her to assess new equipment as needs change. This was the case with upgrading the shop's digital printing.

"Our need for color is only going up," Sicklesteel reports. "Last year we were doing about three-quarters of a million digital color impressions a year. That's probably increasing 20 to 30 percent a year."

A Golden Opportunity

When the 2015-16 school year begins, it will mark CSUSB's 50th anniversary. Having been a part of the school since it opened in 1965, Printing Services maintains strong relationships throughout the campus, including with administration and the school's graphic designers. So as plans for the 50th anniversary begin to unfold, Sicklesteel says Printing Services has been invited into the conversations about logos and other materials that will need to be produced.

Though the anniversary celebrations are still in the planning stages, the in-plant has already been called upon to print potential logos for the university community to consider and provide feedback on.

"They had created about 10 logos and we printed them on the wide-format printers, and had a lunch-and-learn series," she says. "People would wander in campus-wide—custodians, faculty members, athletic directors and student leaders with different student organizations and fraternities—to give input on what they felt best represented Cal State at 50 years."

With the 50-year milestone on the horizon, the San Bernardino campus has grown substantially from its few original facilities and 293 students. Sicklesteel says the in-plant has been growing alongside it from day one, and as long as it continues to find ways to serve the campus community, Printing Services' growth shouldn't show any signs of slowing.

"When they first opened the university and it was one little building downtown, my former manager had a little mimeograph machine, and then he had a typewriter," she reflects. "We've been here all along, and we just keep growing and growing."