Steady Progress, Worthy Results

BRIAN CHEPREN, supervisor of Central Printing Services at Pinellas County Schools, is a fixture in the Florida printing business. His father was a lithographer who taught his son the trade, and Chepren began working in his dad’s business when he was just 12 years old. He worked weekends and summers until he went to Eckerd College where he earned a BA in business administration.

Chepren went back to printing even after college; in 1969 he secured a position in the blueprints department at ECI, a defense contractor now called Raytheon. He then moved into the offset area and ultimately found himself supervising a three-employee operation.

“But I had reached the limit of my advancement there,” he says. So he decided to continue his printing career elsewhere.

A steady march forward has been the defining characteristic of Chepren’s career. At first, he moved himself diligently upward, taking on positions with greater responsibility and earning valuable academic degrees. Later, it would be the in-plant in his charge that he would move firmly toward greater success.

In 1974, Chepren took a job as a printing foreman at a quick print shop while he finished an associates degree in marketing and distribution. Upon receiving his diploma he landed a position in sales at Relevant Productions, a publishing company. But it wasn’t until 1981 that he took a job with Pinellas County Schools as a graphic arts analyst. As soon as he started at the in-plant, he began accepting extra responsibilities. Very quickly, he picked up typesetting.

“And as I moved up, I began to oversee the presses as well,” he says. He was eventually named supervisor of Central Printing Services.

Building the Business

Since then, one of the biggest improvements Chepren made to the in-plant was the implementation of a fully functional chargeback system.

“When I got here, the shop was $100,000 in the hole and they didn’t know why,” he says. “I had a cost accounting background, so we sat down to develop this program.”

From the beginning, Chepren’s goal has been to set pricing so there is a 7- to 10-percent overage at the end of the accounting year, in June. The revenue goes into a general fund the facility can tap for upgrades.The chargeback system has an even greater benefit—it makes it easy to cost-justify the in-plant’s existence.

“We often hear that ‘we’re not a core value.’ I’ve had to justify our existence to board members and new management several times,” says Chepren. Because the pricing is so competitive, Chepren has been able to cement the in-plant in place.

“We’ve done very well,” he says. Recently, the facility moved its chargeback system online, saving time and paperwork.

The second major improvement to the shop since Chepren took over has been the gradual but decisive move away from offset and into digital printing. He lined up the support of the superintendent and the deputy superintendent, and now the shop is accepting digital files and turning jobs around faster than ever.

Today, the in-plant has four image­RUNNER 110s and a Canon CLC 5000. Chepren still handles some offset jobs—they account for about 15 percent of the work. For those jobs, he relies on a pair of Ryobi 3302 perfectors, an A.B.Dick 9985 and an A.B.Dick 360 for envelopes. An old imageRUNNER 105 and a fully stocked bindery round out the 14-employee shop’s capabilities.

The shift to digital is just one issue Chepren found facing fellow K-12 in-plant managers he met at various events. Other challenges included marketing the in-plant and establishing standardized job titles and minimum qualifications for experienced hires. What began as a series of conversations has evolved into fairly regular meetings of Florida K-12 in-plant managers.

“What we’ve set up is very informal and voluntary, which is actually what keeps people involved,” says Chepren. The alliance has proved invaluable in providing members with reference points for their own growth.

But Chepren’s first priority is keeping the in-plant equipped with the best technology. Over the next two years, he expects to see his 6,000-square-foot, $1.6 million operation go completely digital. IPG