A Cuyahoga Comeback

JUSTIFYING NEW equipment on paper is one thing, but real-world verification is far more satisfying. For Jim Sebes that happened not long ago when a customer of the Cuyahoga County Central Services Printing and Reproduction (CSPR) Division asked for a quote on 50,000 single-color, one-sided documents, to be run on the in-plant’s two-color Sakurai press. A local copy shop also made a bid. The customer’s eyes nearly bulged at the result.

“They couldn’t believe the price difference,” recalls Sebes, senior printing coordinator for the eight-employee in-plant. It was $1,400 cheaper to print the job on his in-plant’s offset press. This incident only underscored the fact that Sebes had made the right call a few years ago when he redirected the in-plant away from quick copy investments and more firmly into offset. As a result, the Cleveland-based in-plant has been able to make some impressive growth in the past six years, adding both equipment and staff, while enhancing the quality of the public documents printed for Ohio’s most populous county.

“We haven’t made a wrong move yet,” laughs Sebes, who stepped into this role six years ago, when the in-plant was running a one-color Multi 1850, a two-color Hamada and some Xerox DocuTechs. All of its four-color work was done on copiers.

“They were going more toward fast copy investments rather than print,” he says. “So I saw the need, basically. . .to integrate print and copy to get a good balance.”

By carefully evaluating the county’s needs, gathering the numbers and doing a cost-benefit analysis, Sebes has been able to get county approval for a slew of new equipment that has turned the in-plant completely around. Among the new additions:

• A four-color Ryobi 3404X-DI direct imaging offset press

• A two-color Sakurai Oliver 266 EPZ press

• Océ VarioPrint 2105 and 2110 black-and-white printers

• Canon imageRUNNER 5180 and C3220 color printers

• An Epson wide-format printer/proofer

• A Screen PlateRite CTP system with a Colenta ILP 68/85 FP processor

• An MBO B-27 pile feed folder

• A Wohlenberg cutter

• PCs and Macs, along with Adobe software

Not only that, the increase in business has justified the addition of three employees in the past three years.

“We needed to add the manpower,” Sebes says, noting that employees had been working overtime just to keep up. “With the additional revenue that was coming in, it was well warranted.” He estimates that turnaround times will now improve 40 percent thanks to the increase in staff.

The Move Into Direct Imaging

Back when Sebes first came on board, it was this lack of “manpower” that first got him thinking about a DI press. With it, the need for a darkroom and platemaking operation would be eliminated. And the quick preparation time of a DI (less than 15 minutes from RIPing to first pull) would mean more employee productivity.

“It’s an offset process that runs like a copier,” Sebes explains.

Plus, he reasoned, the DI would greatly improve the quality of short-run four-color work, such as brochures and letterhead.

The in-plant obtained the DI press with a 60-month lease-to-buy arrangement, estimating a four-year return on investment. This proved accurate, Sebes says. As expected, the quality of the printing caught the attention of county employees and this soon translated into more work, including jobs that were previously outsourced. Today, he estimates, 40 percent of the in-plant’s work is four-color, and this doesn’t include digital jobs run on the Canon imageRUNNER 5180.

This success paved the way for the next round of new equipment. The shop replaced its DocuTechs with Océ Vario