A Manager Takes Flight

Sitting idly has never been in the plans for Chuck Werninger, senior manager of Administrative Services for the Houston Independent School District in Houston, Texas. He was on the move starting in his early years, and had lived in 13 states before reaching the legal drinking age.

Chuck Werninger

Born in Arkansas, Werninger grew up the son of an executive at a bank data processing firm, and had dreams of becoming an Air Force pilot. His family relocated often, as his father’s job demanded.

Then, about 25 years ago, his dad decided it was time for a career change. He purchased an AlphaGraphics printing franchise.

“That was his golden parachute, and I am sure he curses it to this day,” Werninger says with a laugh.

After attending Boston University and the University of Oklahoma, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Economics, Werninger decided to join the new family business. He started out making deliveries and performing bindery work. By the time the franchise was shuttered a decade later, he was a general manager.

“I could run every piece of machinery and do every job there,” he recalls. “But I was really a prepress guy. I was a computer geek from the word go.”

Werninger owned a large-format signage business called Green Mountain Color for several years after the AlphaGraphics franchise closed. He then took on a prepress specialist position for a heatset web magazine printer, traveling the country helping magazine art directors learn to move from mailing CDs of files and dealing with bluelines to a digital job submission processes.

Into the In-plant World

The next stop for Werninger was the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, where he spent six years serving as director of Printing Services. Three years ago, he landed his current in-plant management position in Houston, overseeing 45 employees at a 20,000-sq.-ft. facility housing a mix of digital, sheetfed offset, web offset and wide-format equipment.

The shop produces a variety of school materials for the district’s 215,000 students and nearly 30,000 employees. The in-plant also has printing contracts to insource work from the city of Houston, community colleges and other local school districts.

From left: Reba Jelks, Printing Services manager; Chuck Werninger, senior manager, Administrative Services; and Debbie Roberts, Customer Service manager.

“We are not in business to make money,” Werninger stresses in his firm, measured cadence. “We are trying to use the outside business to drive down our overhead so that we can provide a more cost-effective product for the school district. We exist to serve them primarily, but that puts us in the business of owning a whole bunch of equipment that is typically under-used. By servicing some of those other customers, we can use it better.”

The under-utilized equipment has been one of the biggest challenges Werninger has faced since joining the school district’s in-plant. He estimates that a whopping 96% of the work being done by district employees is not going to the in-plant. The lion’s share of that work is being done on a fleet of nearly 1,300 copiers at the schools.

Werninger notes that Houston is a huge metro area often gridlocked with traffic, and that some schools are located 40 miles away from the in-plant.

“It is unrealistic for teachers and administrators to bring jobs to the shop,” he admits. “It is really hard to convince them to come down to the main headquarters to get their print work instead of walking down to the resource room and doing it themselves. We have our sights set on serving them and doing a better job of providing classroom resource materials.”

Werninger confides that he plans to add a web storefront solution soon to ease the ordering process for district employees.

“We are still to this day taking orders from people walking in, people telephoning and people emailing jobs,” he explains. “I saw the opportunity to implement a web storefront as being the primary thing I wanted to accomplish. We think that will make it really easy to price their work and submit their jobs 24 hours a day.”

Inkjet Adventure

Standing with HISD’s new Canon Océ VarioPrint i300 are (from left) James Givens, plant manager, Lin Tan, prepress, Jeremy Tsao, plant production team lead, Angela Walker, plant production team lead, and Chuck Werninger, senior manager.

Another way Werninger would like to improve the operation is by adding newer printing technology and offering more color printing options. To that end, he recently oversaw the installation of an Océ VarioPrint i300 cut-sheet production inkjet press from Canon — the first cut-sheet inkjet press to be installed at an in-plant.

“We invested in inkjet because it’s a much faster, more efficient, more reliable and significantly more cost-effective print production process,” he explains.

Another of his goals is to lower the number of jobs being produced on the fleet copiers, most of which are black-and-white devices.

“There isn’t a student in our schools that thinks in black-and-white,” he contends. “The only place in their world that black-and-white exists is in their copiers.”

Keeping to that theme, the in-plant revamped the district’s commencement programs this year, transforming the project into a memento for parents and students to keep, not just a boring brochure that was handed out at the event.

“That is really the final deliverable that they will leave with,” Werninger explains. “So we made the programs full-color this year for the first time. Not because it was a requirement, but because this is a keepsake.”

Adding a wide-format latex printer to produce wall coverings, wall graphics and interior decoration is also on Werninger’s wish list. He sees this as a big growth opportunity, as there are currently 283 schools in the district, all with walls that could use a splash of decorative designs.

Werninger adds that the shop has been using Facebook and Twitter to give the in-plant more publicity. He hopes this additional visibility will bring more work to the shop.

“We are really trying to plug into the PTO groups,” he says. “I see social media as a huge opportunity.”

Outside of the workplace, Werninger is an airplane pilot with about 30 years of experience. His current interest has him towing gliders most weekends. This involves him flying with a glider plane in-tow. Once they reach about 2,000 feet, the glider releases. The glider operator then can sail across the sky for three to five hours and hundreds of miles — all with no engine.

“I am really fascinated with flying,” Werninger concludes. “Towing gliders gives me the excuse to fly as much as I want to fly.”