Spending Time on Floor 13

TO AVOID problems with superstitious tenants and workers, most landlords skip past 13 when numbering the floors in their buildings. Not so with the offices of HCR ManorCare, a provider of short- and long-term skilled nursing and rehabilitation, headquartered in Toledo, Ohio. The two-employee Document Center is located on the 13th floor, where it shares space with the company’s data center. Both departments report to the manager of Production Services.

The in-plant and data center have a unique arrangement. The in-plant uses the print room on the first shift to produce items like flyers, newsletters, postcards, HR materials, manuals and training materials, and then the data center uses the equipment on the second and third shifts to output company reports and checks.

The two operations not only share the print room, they sometimes share the workload. If the in-plant’s jobs run long, the data center staff can finish them on second shift. And likewise, in-plant staff will assist the data center’s first shift with jobs that are still running when they arrive in the morning.

The situation wasn’t always this way, according to senior analyst Russell Eby.

“The data center just produced reports and checks, then Xerox came in and proposed that the company could expand on this and print other material in-house as well.”

The purchase of a DocuTech 6180 soon followed. “We now have two DocuTechs, two Docu