Back from the Brink

Color Conversion
As time went on, Fabian was able to pull more work into the in-plant by demonstrating how much various BCBS customers could save.
“The CFO thought that letting us have color copiers would only encourage people in the company to use them,” he says. “But every division in this company has its own checkbook. No one has to use us.”
As Fabian explains, potential customers were already going outside the company for color work, but once the in-plant managed to get access to one color machine, their quick service brought customers back in-house and encouraged future growth. Now the in-plant can handle many color jobs that would have previously gone elsewhere.
“If we have someone who wants a 50- to 100-page manual in full color, it would cost them a fortune to go out,” he says, “but if we do it here, the cost savings for the company is tremendous.”
Color jobs over 3,000 copies and monochrome jobs over 300,000 are still outsourced, but almost every other job is once again the in-plant’s prerogative. The numbers tell the story of the in-plant’s growth:
• In 1998, Printing Services produced 21 million images.
• By 2005, that total had grown fivefold to 100 million, despite holding the number of full-time employees to a mere eight over the past five years and working only a single shift.
“The technology lets you do that,” says Fabian. “Going from pure saddle stitch to perfect binding let us go from 150 books an hour to 1,200.”
While the growing numbers are good, Fabian says the best sign of the in-plant’s success is the company’s estimate of dollars saved.
“[Purchasing] accepts bids for our ‘overflow’ work, and from those bids, they apply the lowest figure to our work,” he says. This low-bid figure is multiplied by the volume of the in-plant, and the difference between that value and the in-plant’s actual operating costs shows how much the company saved by using the in-plant.
“In 2004, the ‘savings’ was computed to be over $480,000,” he says.
What’s more, since the original offset operation was closed, Fabian estimates the new digital in-plant has saved the company more than $3.3 million.