Ohio State Printer Moves Downtown

THE STATE of Ohio’s Printing and Mail Services operation had a lot going for it. Its facility on the west side of Columbus boasted a convenient loading dock, more than enough floor space and plenty of free parking.

One thing it didn’t have, though, was easy access to customers, most of which were in downtown Columbus, a good 15 minutes away.

“If you’re in the quick copy business, you really need to be around your customers,” acknowledges Joe Tucker, state printing administrator. “And being out here, logistically, wasn’t a good thing for us because everything we print, we ship downtown.”

So when an opportunity arose to move the in-plant’s production operation into the center of town, a stone’s throw from the state capitol, he grabbed it. Now, after many months of planning and delays, the copy center is settled in its new digs, in the same building as one of the state’s largest agencies.

“We’re right amongst all of our customers,” enthuses Tucker. “Most of them can walk across the street.”

This close proximity will not only improve customer relations, it will cut down on delivery time and, Tucker hopes, motivate customers to send more work to the in-plant rather than doing it themselves.

A Busy Operation

With a budget of $10 million, State Printing and Mail Services employs 72 people, 17 of whom work in the main copy center and four satellite operations. Tucker also oversees the central mail room, a large fulfillment operation and print procurement, which handles some $26 million worth of purchases. By contrast, $2.5 million worth of printing is done in-house.

“When an order comes in from an agency, we can evaluate which [option] is the most cost efficient,” he explains.

Bids for outside jobs are submitted online, opened and certified electronically by the Auditor’s Office, then awarded by Tucker’s print procurement manager.

Jobs produced in-house include training manuals, pamphlets, postcards, calendars, forms, proposals for road contracts and various agency publications. Last year the mainframe printing operation also came under Tucker’s supervision, and that brought in jobs like checks and Medicaid notices. The IBM printers in the mainframe operation are in the process of being replaced by new Océ VP5160 and VP5115 cut-sheet printers, plus four Océ VS7550 continuous-feed printers, Tucker says. The new Océ Prisma front end will allow jobs to be sent to the most appropriate printer, a much-needed new ability, he adds.

Equipment Upgrades

The Océ equipment isn’t the only new gear. In conjunction with the move, the in-plant was able to outfit its new copy center with:

• Two Heidelberg Printmaster QM-46 two-color presses

• A Halm Super Jet Plus XL envelope press

• A Konica Minolta C6500

• Two Canon imageRUNNER Pro 7110s

The new equipment was funded in part by the large drop in rent due to the move.

“We actually are going to save $200,000 a year in rent,” says Tucker—and the first year is rent free. That freed up a lot of budgeted money for the upgrades.

At 15,000 square feet, Tucker says, the previous facility was larger, but it included a lot of unnecessary warehouse space. The new shop—9,000 square feet in size—sits at street level in the Lazarus building, which housed the well-known Lazarus Department Store for more than 150 years. Remembered fondly by Columbus residents, the store closed its doors four years ago and the owners graciously donated the building to the city.

“I’d been wanting to open a center downtown for a long time,” Tucker reveals. “We just didn’t have any place we could go.”

Once he got the green light to relocate there, renovations began. The move took place in mid-February and was largely transparent to customers, Tucker says. This is because the new equipment was installed downtown before the move, so it was ready to go right away.

“The timing of that worked out well,” Tucker says.

Visitors to the new copy center walk past a display of job samples, through glass doors that lead into the prepress/design area and then onto the open production floor. Beyond the Canon black-and-white printers and Konica Minolta C6500 color printer is the offset and bindery area. Compared to the old shop, the layout in the new shop provides for a much smoother production workflow, Tucker says.

Of course, some things aren’t as ideal as they used to be: deliveries now arrive in a freight elevator; employee parking is no longer free; and Tucker has to drive from his west side office when he wants to walk the shop floor. But the payoff in customer convenience makes it all worthwhile.

“We have had a lot of customers come into our facility that were not familiar with our services and they’ll say, ‘I did not know you could do this,’ ” Tucker says.

He hopes this will translate into more business from agencies that have been doing their own printing for years.

Scanning Service A Hit

Government agencies create a lot of paperwork, and storing all the paper is becoming a problem. So a few years ago, Ohio’s Printing and Mail Services operation came up with the idea of offering scanning services, to turn that paper into PDFs.

Joe Tucker, state printing administrator, pitched the idea to customers at the in-plant’s quarterly users group meetings. The response was enthusiastic. So the in-plant bought a Canon DR-9080C scanner and a laptop. The customers started lining up.

“Within a few months we bought another scanner and laptop,” says Tucker. Today the operation has three scanners, two of which it brings right into the agencies for on-site scanning.

“We scan it and provide the file back to them, either on disc or download it to their mainframe,” he says. “Since we started that a couple years ago, we’ve not had a time when we didn’t have a lot of work waiting on us.”

The in-plant charges by the page and amount of indexing the customer requests. Tucker says the rates are less than half of what commercial providers charge.

Offering this new service has helped bring attention to the in-plant’s other capabilities too, he says.

“As we’ve been out in the actual agency doing the work,” he notes, “our staff will see them doing things and say, ‘We can do that in the copy center.’ ”

Consolidating State Printing

The centralization of state printing has been one of Tucker’s prime focuses since he took on the role of State Printer 10 years ago. As in many states, various agencies have bought their own printing equipment over the years, and though their print volumes aren’t high enough to cost justify the machines, they don’t want to give them up.

Print centralization has been the subject of several independent studies in Ohio, Tucker says.

“Every one of those studies has said the same thing: the state central in-plant was significantly more cost efficient...than agency copy centers,” he says.

Tucker has had some success consolidating small agency in-plants, but there are still four main agencies with printing operations. His office conducts ongoing discussions with these agencies, examining all projects they print to determine their cost effectiveness.

“We believe we can save $5-$10 million a year just in...reducing or eliminating the amount of redundant equipment [and resources] out there,” Tucker proclaims.

The in-plant’s relocation brings the State Printing and Mail Services closer than ever to achieving its goal.

“It kind of deflates their argument for having their own print shop when we’re right across the street from them,” he notes. “It’s better for state government to run a few machines all day long than it is to run a lot of machines an hour or two a day.”

Tucker has the governor’s blessing in this quest.

“We have a tremendous amount of support from the current administration,” he says. “The governor’s office recognized the inefficiencies of having multiple machines not fully utilized.”

Tucker hopes to have all agency printing centralized by the end of the fiscal year. Then his in-plant may have the volume to start thinking about a digital press like a NexPress or iGen3, he says.

For the moment, though, the copy center’s new equipment is handling the workflow quite well. And the new downtown facility is proving to be everything Tucker had hoped it would be.