Big Value in Big Sky Country
The wide open spaces of Montana are a thing of beauty, but open production time at the state’s Print & Mail Services Bureau is not quite as attractive. To fill it, the in-plant is finding new work and bringing jobs back in-house.
Deep inside a nondescript, two-story brick building in the center of Helena, Mont., Ryan Betcher ruminates about the days when the state’s Print & Mail Services Bureau was filled with printing presses, running eight hours a day.
“Our typical runs per job were 100,000,” recalls Betcher, Print to Post manager and a 22-year veteran of the in-plant. “These days you don’t see that.”
What you do see are more than a dozen digital printers, with just three offset presses still running. Like all in-plants, Montana’s state printing operation has changed with the times and now focuses on small runs and fast-turnaround jobs, procuring the long-run work from outside printers. But the decrease in print orders has left a void, which the 29-employee in-plant is making a concerted effort to fill.
“As these large press runs disappear, it gets you looking harder at what...you’re outsourcing,” notes Betcher.
“We see the work leaving,” adds Bureau Chief Devin Garrity, “so we’re scrutinizing more of the jobs that are being bid out, and reeling them back in, and finding a way to do them more efficiently in-house.”
As a result of their efforts, jobs once outsourced, like envelopes, business cards and coil binding, have been brought in-house, where they’re produced less expensively. The in-plant is capturing work that agencies once printed on their own equipment, and is actively looking for new opportunities. Garrity is talking with the Department of Commerce, for example, about taking on the fulfillment for the state’s tourism efforts. Saving money for the state while providing faster, more reliable service, is the in-plant’s top priority.
“We’re looking at what’s being printed and the best way to print it,” remarks Betcher. “We’re finding the best value.”
A Magnificent Setting
Located in west-central Montana in the foothills of the Montana Rocky Mountains, Helena has more of a small town feel than most state capitals. Founded by gold miners in the mid-1800s, the city today boasts about 28,000 residents, and sits midway between Glacier and Yellowstone national parks.
About a mile and a half from the state capitol, Print & Mail Services takes up 22,000 square feet of space in what was once a liquor warehouse. Its production area spans the top floor, with the mail operation filling about a quarter of the first floor. A quick copy center is located in the basement of the capitol.
With a budget of $11.15 million, the in-plant is home to digital printing equipment from Xerox, Ricoh, Canon and Toshiba, as well as one- and two-color ABDick and Heidelberg presses. It relies on an Avanti Print MIS solution to handle estimating, job tracking, shop floor management, invoicing, chargeback reports, inventory control and shipping. The shop plans to add the scheduling module soon, Betcher says, followed by Web-to-print so it can move away from email and FTP sites for job delivery.
With all state printing mandated to come to Print & Mail Services, the in-plant can count every state agency as a customer, but its biggest clients are Public Health, the Department of Revenue, the Office of Public Instruction, Fish, Wildlife and Parks, and Labor and Industry. Among the items it prints for them are public assistance notices, statements, tax notices, licenses, letterhead, envelopes, forms, business cards, brochures, booklets, magnets and checks.
“We print probably 2-3,000 checks a day,” notes Garrity.
Still, about 65 percent of the work that comes to Print & Mail Services ends up being procured, he says. By handling that task for agencies, the in-plant gets the best possible savings for the state.
“We can look at the jobs that are coming in and determine where the best value is going to be for the state,” says Betcher.
Sometimes that best value is the in-plant, as with a recent 5,600-piece color job that required a fast turnaround.
“I actually could do the job for $300 less than the lowest bid price,” reveals Betcher.
This type of analysis has also brought other work in-house, such as business cards. In the past, state agencies would order their own cards, sometimes spending $50 to $100 for a box—“which is outrageous,” declares Betcher.
By using digital equipment and encouraging agencies to submit orders for five to 10 people at once to lower costs, the in-plant can print 500 cards for just $10 to $12 per person.
Envelope Opportunity
Another opportunity came with envelopes.
“We used to contract all of our envelope printing out,” Betcher says. Then the shop added an envelope feeder to its Heidelberg TOK duplicator and started printing all state envelopes. It now averages 300,000 envelopes a month, with much faster service.
“Turnaround time used to be 30 days on bid-out envelopes,” says Betcher, “and now we’re turning envelopes within a week.”
Coil binding is another new service the in-plant started providing after adding punching and coil binding systems.
“That’s probably cut the cost of coil binding by 50 percent to the customer,” Betcher says.
The in-plant recently started printing vehicle titles for the Department of Justice’s Title and Registration Bureau. For years that bureau had used its own printer to print them, but each time that machine needed maintenance, licenses couldn’t go out for several days. Because the in-plant has plenty of back-up devices, those delays are a thing of the past.
“There’s no reason that their jobs will be held up any longer,” Betcher points out.
The addition of a Kompac Kwik Finish UV coater a few years ago enabled the in-plant to start offering a somewhat unique service: “We [UV coat] medical marijuana cards here,” Garrity relates.
Montana is one of 23 states that has legalized marijuana for medicinal purposes. To ensure it only gets into the right hands, Montana’s Public Health agency distributes official identification cards.
“Public Health needed a way to make their cards so they couldn’t be easily counterfeited,” explains Betcher. So the in-plant stepped forward. It supplies shells containing Public Health’s letterhead information and a screened-back state seal. As applications come in, Public Health prints the cards and returns them to the in-plant for a UV coating to prevent tampering.
“We insert them and mail them out,” Betcher says. “When the program first started, we were doing 3,000 of those a day.” Today it’s down to a hundred or two a day, he says.
Postal Savings
One of the biggest savings the in-plant provides for the state comes from postal discounts. Twice a day the mail operation gathers mail from agencies all over Helena, comingling and presorting it for the best discounts.
“We try to automate as much as we possibly can to save the state as much money as we can on their postage,” Garrity says.
“The state receives a big savings as far as us being able to gather all their mail and comingle it so we can get the presort rates,” adds Betcher, who estimates a savings of 2-3 cents for each piece. “We typically run 30-40,000 pieces of mail a day on our sorting machine.”
The in-plant is also in charge of the state’s fleet of copiers and MFDs, though Betcher acknowledges that many agencies are still clinging to their old desktop printers and fax machines. The state is doing a pilot managed print program with the Department of Administration and the in-plant hopes to have an exclusive contract within a year.
Overseeing this program also has another advantage.
“We get an idea what kind of volume people are running through their photocopier/multifunctional device,” says Garrity. “So we look at that and then we try to market our services.”
Looking ahead, Garrity says the in-plant is about to replace its Xerox 5000 with a Canon imagePRESS C800. He would also like to upgrade the shop’s 24˝ wide-format printer to be able to do larger posters and banners in-house instead of bidding them out.
Overall, he and Betcher have a good feeling about the future of the Print & Mail Services Bureau. The last real privatization effort was back in 1988, and since then local printers have settled down, content with the work the in-plant is procuring from them. And state agencies are likewise satisfied with the savings and fast turnaround the in-plant is providing.
“I think they see the value of this organization because of the services we provide,” concludes Garrity.
Bob has served as editor of In-plant Impressions since October of 1994. Prior to that he served for three years as managing editor of Printing Impressions, a commercial printing publication. Mr. Neubauer is very active in the U.S. in-plant industry. He attends all the major in-plant conferences and has visited more than 180 in-plant operations around the world. He has given presentations to numerous in-plant groups in the U.S., Canada and Australia, including the Association of College and University Printers and the In-plant Printing and Mailing Association. He also coordinates the annual In-Print contest, co-sponsored by IPMA and In-plant Impressions.
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