Comprehensive Service in Cincinnati

Time: It flies; it's of the essence; it waits for no one. And, of course, it's money.

Still, the in-plant serving The Cincinnati Insurance Companies demonstrates a particular talent for saving, finding and making all the time necessary to reduce costs and satisfy ultra-tight turnaround requirements.

The in-plant often receives rush-job requests. "And we never say 'no,' " declares Roger Chamberlain, secretary and manager of printing.

A typical need-for-speed scenario occurs when financial data is not available until the close of the business day, yet investor and accounting executives require that data to be incorporated into formal presentation materials critical for next-morning meetings.

"Our staff willingly accommodates corporate needs," Chamberlain asserts, noting that team members are ready to alter work schedules, stay late or arrive early to ensure project completion.

Timely turnaround is facilitated by the in-plant's ability to produce nearly all of the company's work internally. Today, the in-plant handles approximately 98 percent of Cincinnati Insurance's print production needs—such as marketing brochures, and associate and agency communications—in-house.

"The only outsourced jobs are portions of our annual report, pocket folders, high-volume envelopes and a couple of other miscellaneous items," Chamberlain relates. The in-plant even insources a little work, not for profit, but to support its insurance professional associations.

The Move Toward Efficiency

The 55-year-old operation wasn't always so self-sufficient or efficient. In 1999, when Chamberlain was tapped to oversee the in-plant, the facility still had first right of refusal, but only generated about 70 percent of the company's work in-house.

Chamberlain has been with the Ohio-based company since 1986, and has a background in business and IT project management.

"One of the things I was charged with was to look at the relationship between in-house production and outsourcing," he recalls. "We were spending well over a million dollars per year outsourcing." And while the company values all of its vendor relationships, he adds, the in-plant needed to focus primarily on equipment procurement rather than purchasing print.

Equipment procurement certainly has helped the in-plant bring more work in-house. "Our move to CTP was a big factor," Chamberlain notes, clarifying that, in 2002, the facility invested in an ECRM Mako computer-to-plate system. "Through continual migration into digital technology, we're able to produce faster without so many hands touching the work."

While high-tech enhancements have empowered the in-plant, operational policy and prioritization changes have had even greater impact.

"We needed to learn to work a little differently, and we've since moved to a more business-based versus a production-based operation," Chamberlain explains.

"Previously, work was assigned according to equipment availability and it was up to individual equipment operators to make those assignments," he continues. "The operators' quality of work was always outstanding, but it was hard to keep up with the demand."

Chamberlain has put into place a leadership team that meets daily to discuss job prioritization, roadblocks, emergencies and solutions, and to oversee scheduling according to corporate requirements. "We've learned to let our printers focus on print, while incorporating a more active leadership model," he summarizes.

Reducing Bindery Outsourcing

In addition, Chamberlain determined that the in-plant's fully equipped bindery and post-processing area was underutilized.

"A lot of what we outsourced was bindery work," he recalls. "We didn't even have a full-time position allocated to the bindery."

He's quick to dispel the perception of the back end as low end. "A lot of people see the bindery as an entry-level position, but it's just as important as [prepress or printing], perhaps even more important from a cost standpoint," Chamberlain points out. "If a job takes five steps, and you mess up step two, you only have to redo step one. But, if we mess up at step five, we have to repeat the whole process."

Several years ago, Chamberlain identified a bindery associate as a key position and the bindery now has a full-time employee plus temporary help. All back-end work—cutting, collating, binding, shrink wrapping—is now done in-house. Very little new equipment was needed; the department just began using what it had more effectively.

The bindery now provides the perfect finishing touch for the rest of the 14,500-square-foot in-plant. The four-person prepress department encompasses desktop publishing, preparing files for Web uploads, graphic design, digital photography, wide-format printing and scanning, editing, proofing, laminating, foam core mounting, framing and even self-inking stamp creation. Xerox and HP wide-format printers are used for proofing, as well as for marketing displays, and legal and trial exhibits.

Both Offset and Digital

Chamberlain explains that the production printing area is divided into two units: traditional offset and xerographic. The traditional pressroom unit, with two press operators, features a Heidelberg Quickmaster DI 46-4, a four-color digital offset press. The in-plant also operates a two-color Heidelberg GTO ZP-52 perfector with diecutting, scoring, and perforating; a one-color Solna 125; and an A.B. Dick 8820 for envelopes and letterhead.

The xerographic unit, also with two operators, consists of a Xerox iGen3 with inline Duplo DBM 5000 booklet maker, a Xerox Nuvera 288, and a pair of Xerox Freeflow scanners.

Most of the in-plant's color work is produced on the Quickmaster DI and iGen3. About 60 percent of offset jobs and 30 percent of xerographic jobs are full-color, and Chamberlain expects those percentages to increase steadily.

Those color jobs are assigned to a particular device based on factors such as run length, time (deadlines), and overall project cost.

"The supervisor of this area has a formula that is applied to jobs to assist in making this determination," Chamberlain states.

Correct determination is key. "When our President's Club annual magazine was printed digital offset, it took nine days through many press proofs and revisions, printing and bindery," Chamberlain details. "Now that we've moved it to the iGen, production takes one and a half days."

On the other hand, "we typically utilize the digital offset press for certain colors where four-color process provides a more accurate [result] than the PMS solid produced through the xerographic process—oranges and certain blues are more difficult to color match when printed with the xerographic process," he explains. Longer color runs are also usually better suited to the Quickmaster DI.

The in-plant produces 75 million impressions annually, 47.5 million of which are output by the mainframe-generated transactional print center, which runs 24 hours a day, five days a week (plus one weekend shift) via six staff members. All transactional print work, notably policies and invoices, is monochrome.

"We are looking at the role of color in transactional print and the opportunity for transpromo production—that is, what marketing ability we have to provide education or information to policyholders on their invoices or other materials," he discloses.

Constant Marketing

Chamberlain markets the in-plant to the company's business units constantly. "We give tours of this area to all new associates and those being groomed for leadership positions," he enthuses.

Even when the in-plant is out of sight, Chamberlain makes sure it isn't out of mind. "Our associate manager is involved in meetings whenever the company considers launching a new project," he explains.

Currently, the in-plant is financed corporately. "However, we're working toward an expense allocation model, which we think will help us save money," Chamberlain reveals. "When costs are lumped as a corporate print expense, executives can't really understand true print expenses. They'll have a much better awareness of true expenses when they actually see specific, department-level costs.

"For example, business units typically don't consider that printing and binding methods can have widely varying costs," he illustrates. "Not everything has to be on a particular grade of paper or in a three-ring binder. There are many print and finishing options."

Ask not what your company can do for your in-plant, but what your in-plant can do for your company.

"That's our number-one priority," Chamberlain concludes.