Mass Transition - In-plant Impressions

By Dawn Greenlaw-Scully

To Catch a Thief

Trying to track down missing transit passes, Metro helped postal and law-enforcement officials take a mail thief for a ride—to prison

In Metro’s mail room, part of Office Services, you’d expect staff to perform duties such as sort and ship, not sleuth and solve. Yet, when the transit agency became the victim of mail theft, the Office Services team acted as a letter-perfect crime-solving apprentice.

Among the agency’s major mailings are regular shipments of light-rail and bus transit passes to retail ticket vendors, such as grocery, convenience and department stores.

“There can be many thousands of dollars worth of passes in one envelope, so we keep tight control over the mailing process,” notes Director of IT Quality Assurance and Office Services Kent Swagler, explaining that a certified return receipt is attached to each envelope, and acknowledgment of receipt is required.

In early 2008, Metro was notified that a couple of vendor sites had not received their weekly and monthly passes. “We would get back torn, empty envelopes,” Swagler reports.

According to Swagler, Metro’s Office Services and Transit Passenger Revenue departments contacted the United States Postal Service-Office of Inspector General (USPS-OIG) to report the missing mailings, which were valued at more than $100,000. Both Metro and the USPS suspected foul play.

The two organizations worked jointly to crack the case.

“The USPS-OIG worked closely with our departments to identify losses and conduct surveillance on mailings,” he recalls.

Swagler reports that, in August 2008, the thief was caught red-handed. “The USPS-OIG arrested a postal tractor-trailer driver when he was observed stealing the passes,” he details, explaining that the driver had thrown envelopes against a wall, which caused them to rip, and then claimed that the passes must have been lost when the envelopes were torn “accidentally.”

Metro mail room employees had been reinforcing the 6x9˝ envelopes by wrapping them in packing tape. To increase security, Swagler switched to a pre-printed polyester envelope.

“Even though these envelopes are more expensive, they’re worth it,” he opines. “Unless you take a knife to it, this envelope is not going to break.”

The case was brought to a satisfactory conclusion in spring 2009. “[The driver] was sentenced to a year and a day in federal prison and ordered to pay more than $76,000 in restitution to Metro,” Swagler confirms.

Though horse-drawn omnibuses and old-fashioned trolleys may have once been public transportation mainstays, they made way long ago for modern bus lines and light rail systems. After all, a transit authority that doesn't keep pace with vehicular developments, trends and innovations will find itself going nowhere fast.

Along similar lines, a mass transit provider's in-plant must stay up to speed, philosophically and practically.

At Metro, the transit agency serving the St. Louis region, the five-employee in-plant knows this very well. Located just blocks from the Mississippi River—within sight of the city's famous Gateway Arch—the in-house printing and mailing facility recently executed multiple, multi-faceted initiatives that have resulted in improved quality, increased efficiency and major cost savings.

The St. Louis Metro system serves more than 200 municipalities in Missouri and Illinois via light rail, bus and paratransit van systems that, according to the agency, provided transportation to more than 53 million passengers in 2009. Other Metro-controlled operations include the Gateway Arch transportation system, parking facility and riverboat cruises, as well as the St. Louis Downtown Airport. Metro employs approximately 2,300 people.

The in-plant has been supporting Metro for more than 20 years, producing platform schedules, training and employee documentation/manuals, forms, business cards and stationery, newsletters and board meeting materials, among other jobs. The facility also houses a full-service mail center. Both printing and mailing functions are considered part of Metro's Office Services department.

Founded as an offset print shop, the in-plant went digital about 10 years ago with the installation of one color and one monochrome system. Kent Swagler joined the agency in September 2003 to create the IT Software Quality Assurance department. In August 2004, he was appointed director of IT Office Services. Swagler began assessing current conditions and affecting positive change, focusing on the mail room in 2005.

"Our postage equipment was antiquated," he remembers. To resolve this, the shop brought in new Neopost solutions, which added address presort and inserting capabilities, reducing postage costs and helping to integrate printing and mailing.

"Once a year, we do a 22,000- to 23,000-piece promotional mailing for the Gateway Arch to schools in the region," Swagler relates. "Thanks to our presort capabilities, we saved $25,000 in printing and postage on one mailing."

New postal scales also proved to have weighty advantages.

"Mailing weekly passes used to be a manual, cumbersome process," he states. "It used to take a minute to weigh and calculate the postage for each package—and we'd typically send out hundreds in one day.

"But with the new scales, you have a tray of envelopes and, with a couple of mouse clicks, you can calculate the weight difference of what you pulled off and apply the postage tape in about 15 seconds."

Growing Demand for Color

On the print side, the priority was upgrading the shop's color capabilities to accommodate ever-increasing demand. In October 2007, Swagler replaced the in-plant's older printers with two IKON CPP650 color units and one IKON 1050 Print Center Pro monochrome machine with a perfect binding attachment. Also added was a Ricoh MP1100 monochrome printer with in-line GBC plastic spiral bind paper punch.

FY2009 marked the first year in which Metro's in-plant produced more than one million color copies. As copies rose, costs plummeted. Swagler calculates that the shop's per-click charges for color decreased from 10¢ on the old printer to approximately 4¢ on the new systems.

"In addition, instead of setting an average and charging for overages, IKON just said 'pay for what you print,' which saved us a lot of money," Swagler reports. "As a result, we were able to recover our costs [in December 2009], reducing an expected five-year payback to just over two years."

The new printers are equipped with a variety of finishing features, which expanded the shop's capabilities and have been tremendous time savers. One color printer features saddle stitching, folding and front-edge cutting; one monochrome printer allows perfect binding.

"I believe that we're the only facility in the region that offers perfect binding," Swagler remarks.

Consequently, the facility is now able to print Metro's annual report in-house, along with especially complex technical manuals.

"For example, we print manuals that contain a lot of electronic schematics," Swagler notes. "One manual is 180 pages, about 40 percent of which are legal-sized and leaf-folded. On our old equipment, we had to fold and collate those pages manually, which took about 45 minutes per book for a run of 200 to 300 books. Now, we're printing and collating in the equipment, which takes less than five minutes per book."

Other Improvements

Additional stops along the in-plant's continuous-improvement route include:

In January 2009, working with Xerox, the shop switched to polyester paper for the production of platform schedules and other jobs.

"By eliminating the need for lamination and by buying 12x18˝ polyester sheets, which we can cut down for various users, we've already saved nearly $30,000," Swagler reports. "And now the schedules are much less likely to get damaged or ruined."

The staff has also been in the process of redesigning forms, such as pre-inspection checklists, and making them carbonless.

"Previously, we printed one checklist per card, which fit on about two-thirds of a sheet of paper, so we had a significant amount of paper waste," he recounts. "We've reduced the size of the form so we can now print three across on 11x17˝ stock, cut them and use glue binding to make pads." More efficient use of paper has translated into a $3,000 savings. The department is also seeking to minimize overall forms production and convert to electronic forms.

Swagler converted the 38 walk-up copiers in various Metro facilities from straight copier machines to scan-and-copy systems, increasing jobs, but decreasing paper consumption.

"Since 2004, we've reduced our annual usage of letter paper from 2,600 cases of letter paper to only 800 cases," he declares.

By buying blue nameplate stock, printing three per page and attaching Velcro tabs, production costs have been cut from $6.50 to $3.25 per nameplate.

As a result of the collective effort, the in-plant is now able to produce about 90 percent of Metro's printing jobs, Swagler figures.

"I've been able to reduce our operational budget from $475,000 to $210,000 without increasing our staff [of five]," he assesses. "And overtime has dropped from 140 to 150 hours annually down to about 20 to 30 hours."

As Metro strives for "regional economic development through excellence in transportation," its in-plant will likewise work hard to maintain high operational standards and help Metro meet its goals. IPG

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