By staying cost-conscious, customer-focused and business-oriented, Parkview Health Printing and Postal Services has significantly boosted its vitality.

By Dawn Greenlaw-Scully

Records Retention and Scanning

In late 2010, Parkview Health Printing and Postal Services launched a Records Retention and Scanning operation to better manage the health system’s records. The operation now employs five full- and part-time employees (equal to three full-time positions) and is located in the distribution center at Parkview’s headquarters

Spearheaded by Gene Voelker, manager of Supply Chain Business Services, the new service has greatly reduced the amount of material Parkview was paying to store. Voelker says that assessing the items being stored offsite was an eye-opener.

“One vendor had 60,000 of our boxes,” he recalls. “We went through all of them and found everything from a whole pallet of boxes with each box containing just one envelope...to boxes full of desk contents and surgical trays.

“By the end of the process, we discovered that more than 50 percent of the contents didn’t even need to be stored,” he reveals.

Since that time, the in-plant has gone through an additional 20,000 boxes, sent out a total of 18 semi-trailer trucks of material to be destroyed and now stores all records internally in a 25,000-square-foot space.

“We take your box, retrieve files as requested, store it and, at the end of its life cycle, we’ll send it out to be destroyed,” Voelker explains. “Each box has a barcode, and everything is searchable, including a description of the box, in case the customer forgets the number.” Customers use an online request form for storage and retrieval requests.

“We also started scanning and archiving files this year, and we’re already maxed out on the amount of work we can do in that area,” he adds.

Even Voelker has been surprised by the “record-setting” success of the initiative. “We thought growth would be slow, but we had 51 percent growth in 2012 and expect 23 percent growth in 2013,” he says. “And we’ve saved over $200,000 for each of the three years, with nearly $300,000 the first year.”

Location may not be everything, but being situated inside Parkview Health's headquarters has certainly helped Printing and Postal Services secure its position as Parkview's primary provider of print and related services. What has enabled the in-plant to thrive, though, has been its consistent ability to reduce costs, raise quality and add value for Parkview, an 8,700-employee, not-for-profit community-based health system serving northeastern Indiana and Ohio.

In 2006, however, the in-plant's prognosis was not so optimistic. At that time, Parkview outsourced much of its printing, and the in-plant was struggling to justify its own existence.

Enter Gene Voelker to lead the operation as manager of Supply Chain Business Services. Voelker helped the in-plant leverage its lodgment within the 146,000-square-foot distribution center at Parkview's headquarters in Fort Wayne, Ind., to bring print business in-house.

"During my first couple of years, when we'd see outsourced jobs come in on the loading dock, I'd get right out there to look at the jobs and analyze costs, then go to the customers to tell them how we could produce the same product at 40 percent savings, and ask why they were outsourcing," he recalls.

"The initial two or three years were a little rough," he admits, "but as customers got on board, I was able to soften my approach." In time, "Why are you outsourcing?" evolved into "Why would you want to go anywhere else?"

The in-plant has since enjoyed steady year-over-year growth; it experienced a 27 percent rise in 2012 alone. Today, the in-plant produces the vast majority of Parkview's print jobs, which accounted for 25 million impressions in 2006 and are expected to reach 44 million impressions in 2013.

"Only very high-end marketing collateral is being outsourced now—and that's one of our future targets," Voelker notes.

Color Printing Growth

Printing Services produces educational, marketing and training materials for Parkview, as well as medical forms, business cards and items classified as synthetics. Typical production hours are a 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. staggered shift.

The in-plant also includes a Postal Services unit and, together, Printing and Postal Services operate out of a 7,000-square-foot site with the equivalent of 10.4 full-time staff positions.

Although less than a third (31 percent) of the in-plant's jobs are color, color work has grown 222 percent since 2006 versus 2.5 percent growth for black-and-white work. Training and patient-education materials have been the biggest drivers of color production, according to Voelker.

"Departments used to do their own work on [HP] Deskjets, whereas now we're doing saddle-stitched, high-end color products for them," he relates.

"Producing more color gives us the opportunity to save more money because color tends to be marked up much higher [when purchased from outside suppliers]," he explains. "Because we have no profit motive, our color pricing has gone down as we've reduced our costs." The shop recently installed new Ricoh Pro C901 and C901+ color printers.

Such a strong business spike in 2012 can be attributed in large part to the opening of two new hospitals within the system. "We were working seven days a week," Voelker recalls.

Entrepreneurial Thinking

Yet, the in-plant's overall growth and stability has much to do with being open to non-traditional print work. "We need to think like entrepreneurs instead of just a department," declares Voelker, whose background is in business and finance.

For example, a little more than a year ago, the in-plant began printing on synthetics. Voelker defines synthetics as non-paper products or products combined with paper that have a lot of characteristics of plastics, including polyester paper, and removable and permanent clings. The operation is also printing on a cloth-like material.

The shop is using synthetics for a number of applications. "We own an insurance company and