By combining printing with multimedia, LIMRA Business Services gets its company’s message out in a variety of ways.

By Bob Neubauer

The Path to Multimedia

Before it was Business Services, LIMRA’s in-plant was a traditional offset operation with some analog copiers. Its path to multimedia was paved largely through the vision of Bill Maura, multimedia supervisor.

Maura started his LIMRA career 37 years ago in the in-plant. Before Xerox had even come out with a digital copier, he was on the phone with them, asking for a timetable.

In the early ’90s, Maura was instramental in eliminating the offset presses and making the in-plant an all-toner operation after extensive research into the costs, quality requirements and safety issues.

Because LIMRA is a research and marketing firm, it generates a lot of data. Members have always wanted that data as quickly as possible, but research reports often took months to produce in the past. So Maura tried to think of alternate ways to disseminate data.

When the company wanted to distribute copies of the president’s speech, he compressed it onto a floppy disk. Always interested in video, he pushed the department into videotaping sessions and dubbing them onto VHS tapes. When streaming video technology came along, he jumped right on that.

As a result, Business Services has become far more than a support service for LIMRA; it’s an integral part of the company’s research and marketing business. Not only does Business Services help LIMRA present its educational conferences, it distributes the resulting educational materials in formats that clients want.

As a research and marketing firm for life insurance and financial organizations, LIMRA International hosts quite a few conferences—more than 20 a year. When it needs conference brochures and programs, the Windsor, Conn.-based company naturally turns to its in-plant.But printing isn’t this in-plant’s only skill. Called Business Services, the 13-employee operation also provides multimedia services: photography, video recording/editing, PowerPoint support and CD/DVD creation. So for each of LIMRA’s conferences, the in-plant may check speakers’ PowerPoints and fix problems, put those presentations on CD, videotape the sessions, edit them, add music, burn them onto DVDs, print labels and accompanying brochures and mail them.

When LIMRA organizes focus groups, Business Services records and photographs the proceedings, putting the video on DVD and using the photos in publications. Staff videotapes speeches and plays them at conferences and also handles in-house audio-visual needs, like setting up projectors for meetings.

Sally Miller, assistant vice president of marketing operations, oversees the operation and says it makes perfect sense to pair printing and multimedia, since most A/V projects require printed support materials. Having all those folks on the same team allows projects to come together smoothly.

The guys from multimedia can walk right over and say, ‘Where’s the flyer for these CDs?’ ” points out Miller. “The team comes together on their own, because they’re all under one umbrella.”

That umbrella is part of the maketing department, which reports directly to LIMRA’s president. Being part of marketing has made life a lot easier, Miller says, and brought the in-plant more work.

There’s a lot of support from the marketing department,” she reports.

It wasn’t always that way.

We used to be Administrative Services, and we were out there all by ourselves, and we were a support group,” she says. “Now we’re a part of marketing, and we’re a group that makes things happen. It’s great.”

It’s certainly a good deal for customers, who only have to go to one department for projects that require A/V, printing and mailing. Business Services schedules it all and provides cost information for the whole project.

We know how busy our customer is, so we’re doing the work for them,” Miller says.

The in-plant has even implemented “one-hour waiting” for single-sided print jobs of up to 150 copies to keep those on-the-go customers happy.

We guarantee it, under all circumstances,” Miller insists.

An All-color Operation

The in-plant uses only digital color equipment: a new Xerox 6060 and two Konica Minolta printers, an 8050 and a C500. Miller says black-and-white costs are very reasonable on the color machines.

The in-plant got its first color printer after Miller met someone at an IPMA conference who was selling one. She drove down to New Jersey to pick it up. LIMRA customers got one taste of color and they wanted more, more, more.

It used to be 60 percent black-and-white and 40 percent color,” she notes. “Now it’s 90 percent color, 10 percent black-and-white.”

All three printers have inline folding and stitching, and the 6060 also has scoring and trimming.

Print On Demand

In recent years, the in-plant has moved to a print-on-demand workflow, which has brought numerous benefits.

“The nice thing about implementing print-on-demand...is that we’ve reduced our warehouse to one quarter of what it was,” she says. This has saved close to $80,000 a year, she adds.

Also, by shortening run lengths, the in-plant can do more work in-house. When those jobs had longer runs and were sent to commercial printers, they took longer and cost more.

“A lot of the commercial printers have been charging fuel surcharges,” she notes—not to mention additional fees for alterations. Both of those costs are now eliminated. Plus, those pieces destined for the mail stream can be packed and labeled as they come out of the printer.

To store all the large files the in-plant generates, Miller purchased an extra hard drive and networked it. This helps the department’s PCs run better and saves staff the time it used to take pouring through piles of CDs, looking for old jobs.

Though Business Services clearly has a lot of company support, Miller still compares her costs with those of outside service providers and gives quarterly presentations to her boss.

LIMRA’s decision to combine printing and multimedia in the same group has kept things interesting, Miller says.

“There are so many facets of it that it’s really exciting,” she says.

Business Services employees have the opportunity to learn about more than just printing, she says, noting that an order processing person is now being trained in multimedia.

Miller feels video and print complement each other nicely, since printed products are often featured in videos.

“The video makes the print come alive,” she says.

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Bob Neubauer Author's page

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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