Making the Grade at Charlotte-Mecklenburg

FOR ALVIN Griffin, director of Graphic Production for North Carolina’s Charlotte-Mecklenburg School District, and proud owner of a new Xerox iGen3 digital press, a K-12 in-plant stays in the good graces of the superintendent for one primary reason.

“We’re dedicated to their needs,” he says. “We provide the support documents for the teachers and the administration. We provide documents used by the students. Ultimately, our goals are aligned with the goals of everyone else in the organization: Education.”

Keeping aligned with the goals of the organization became especially important with the arrival of a new superintendent, Peter Gorman. After 100 days at the helm of the district, Gorman rolled out a “strategic plan” and challenged the staff at every part of the organization to show its adherence to best practices, dedication to the students, and to fiscal responsibility. The district is home to 161 individual schools and a growing student body that recently crested over 130,000. Griffin came at the challenge aggressively.

“We’ve been in touch with the 100 largest school district in-plants in the nation to benchmark our progress with theirs,” he says. “We’ve organized around a ‘just-in-time’ delivery strategy.” With a JIT framework in place, the in-plant works closely with the district’s Forms Department (an entity separate from the print shop) to manage inventory more effectively.

Cost: A Competitive Advantage

Another big reason the in-plant has made a fixture of itself within the district is cost.

“That may be our biggest competitive advantage,” says Griffin. “We can verify that at the end of the year we’re bringing money back into the school district. And we can almost always offer a better price on any job than an outside shop.”

The in-plant starts off the school year with an “operating budget” of $348,000. “That’s seed money,” says Griffin. “We use it to expand our services, and with the chargeback system by the end of the year it goes back to the district.”

Recently, the in-plant has been using that system to support some major upgrades: computer-to-plate equipment and a Xerox iGen3 digital press.

The 14-employee, 15,000-square-foot operation houses a graphic design and prepress department, plus a print shop with full bindery. Prepress is home to a suite of Macs sending work to a one-year-old Glunz & Jensen PlateWriter 4200 CTP device, which uses ink-jet technology to churn out plates. For Griffin, one of the most gratifying benefits of the new platesetter is that he can bring his customers press proofs in less than a minute.

“People are expecting older-generation technology, so when they see this, it really leaves them with the impression that we are a leading-edge operation,” says Griffin. “We still have a camera, and we still have all the darkroom equipment, but I haven’t been in the darkroom in over a year.”

On the digital print side, the shop’s new hotshot, the Xerox iGen3, has been pumping out huge amounts of print-on-demand work— 500,000 copies in February. It took 14 months of research and work with the purchasing department to get the iGen3, Griffin says.

“Being in the public’s eye can make it more difficult to spend on big-ticket items. We have to be careful and know our customers are getting more bang for their buck as a result of one of these major equipment purchases,” says Griffin.

Big Crowd Pleaser

Griffin often hosts tours of the in-plant so that his customers get a full understanding of the on-site shop’s capabilities. He saves the iGen3 for the finale.

“When people see the iGen3, their jaws hit the floor. There’s no noise. There’s no smell of pressroom chemistry. There’s just this big press that can print the same thing their multi-purpose [color laser] machine can, only much, much faster and in much greater quantities.”

As a result of these tours, Griffin says the in-plant has seen an increase in the amount of work headed to the iGen. In fact, a good amount of medium-run offset work has been sent to the new press as well.

“I never would have believed we would generate so much volume off that equipment,” he says.

The shop’s other gear includes several Ryobi presses, a Riso duplicator, and Xerox DocuTech and DocuColor printers. It also has two Xerox 665 scanners.

Cost Cutting Measures

In part to stay in line with the superintendent’s direction to drive fiscal responsibility, and in part because it made good business sense anyway, the Graphic Production department at Charlotte-Mecklenburg School District has looked for areas in which it could cut costs. For most K-12 in-plants, the busiest time of year is actually the summer, when all the forms, letters and educational material required for the year is being printed. During those hectic few months, Director Alvin Griffin brings on school district bus drivers on a temporary basis. As a result, he gets the help he needs without having to hire full-time. He earns points with the transportation department as well because it can more easily retain employees it might otherwise lose during the summer.

Another strategy for cutting costs has been, surprisingly enough, the purchase of new technology. Griffin has been able to scale 4,000 annual overtime hours down to 200 as a result of the recent purchases. In fact, with he exception of a few of the Ryobi presses, all of the equipment being used in the shop is new. The new technology has been so effective, the in-plant was able to stay productive without having to hire a new staff member when one left. At the moment, Griffin has the district’s purchasing department researching a new four-color Sakurai press.

Dedicated Staff

Griffin credits the staff for the in-plant’s success.

“They’re really excellent,” he says. “They have a dedication and a level of skill that you can’t get at a big commercial printer.” Griffin can be sure of that because, as part of his program of best practices, he consistently asks his customers to complete feedback surveys.

“Right now, we’re scoring a 99.8 percent across four key areas. But we don’t sit back and feel good about that, because when you score a 99.8, you can still get better—but there’s a lot of room to fall, too.”

It’s a blind survey—the comment cards are handed to customers and they are returned to the shop through the mail. There are four questions:

n Did the finished product meet your expectations for quality?

n Was the work produced in a timely manner?

n Was your job handled with professionalism?

n Was the cost appropriate?

Griffin uses the feedback from the comment cards to help decide what direction to take the in-plant in the future.

Right now, the bulk of the work handled by the in-plant includes school fact sheets, budget documents, service manuals, human resources forms, student and faculty handbooks, transportation schedules, carbonless forms, posters for the media centers and 63,350 commencement programs.

More Digital Than Offset Work

About 60 percent of the printing comes off the digital machines, the rest from offset presses. Every day more work is going digital, though. The vast majority of the work—over 90 percent—is black-and-white, though the shop just crossed the 10 million mark for color impressions.

As the shop moves into the future, Griffin says he would like to see more of the work his in-plant handles come in over the Internet.

“I think a digital storefront, where people can order from their own desks, is going to become very important,” he says. And while the in-plant is pulling in 85 to 95 percent of the work at the school, he’d like to see that number climb higher, though not as a result of lobbying to get a right of first refusal.

“I wouldn’t want to think we were using that as a crutch,” he says.

Griffin has spent 30 years in print management. With only seven of them at Charlotte-Mecklenburg, he’s just getting started.IPG