A New Lease on Life

"Based on those experiences, the first thing I did was reach out and talk to customers," she says. "I wanted to know what they liked, what they didn't like, where they thought we needed to improve and how we might be able to capture the design work that was being outsourced to firms off campus."

Feedback ran the gamut, from very happy customers to unhappy customers. In some cases, Rutledge discovered, work was being sent off campus because of a lack of confidence that it could be completed accurately and on time by the campus print shop. In other cases, the in-plant simply did not have the resources to accomplish the work.