Big Mission, Bold Plans
PROVIDING SERVICES of any kind to the Houston Independent School District (HISD) means thinking big—there's simply no other way to approach the task.
Educating more than 220,000 students in a 301-square-mile network of elementary, middle and high schools, HISD is the seventh-largest public school system in the nation and the largest in Texas. With an annual budget in excess of $1.6 billion and a work force of more than 28,000 full- and part-time employees, HISD is a producer and a consumer of services on a truly Texas-sized scale.
For the in-plant that caters to HISD's prodigious printing requirements, thinking big comes naturally. So does thinking boldly.
The HISD Printing Services department offers its primary customer an array of offset and digital output services—but it defines its mission much more ambitiously than that:
• The in-plant prints for customers other than HISD in a competitive insourcing program that now accounts for about one-quarter of its budget.
• By marketing itself as a provider of facilities management (FM) services for other organizations (like the City of Houston), HISD Printing Services competes directly with the brand-name behemoths of the FM niche (see sidebar).
• The in-plant has a track record of achieving six-figure savings in copier fleet management, and is even handling fleet management for other school districts.
• By building capability in digital document management and other ancillary services, the in-plant is preparing itself for the day when even a customer with an appetite for print as hearty as HISD's will come to depend less on hard copy and more on electronic alternatives.
Much of this out-of-the-box thinking has arisen during the tenure of Charlotte "Charlie" Holden, HISD's director of Administrative Services. Holden, who joined HISD 17 years ago as a production manager, has been in her present position for one year, following the retirement of the previous director, Steve Blakely. She was promoted to the post after serving as supervisor of business services, a role in which she oversaw and marketed the department's FM and copier fleet activities.
Hub and Spokes
The multi-location Printing Services department, a branch of Administrative Services, consists of the main printing plant at 228 McCarty Drive; a copy center at the HISD administration building; and a copy center at the affiliated Spring Branch ISD, also in Houston. Together, the facilities are staffed by 36 people working in a total of 15,500 square feet of production space. Most of the volume is produced at the McCarty plant, a 13,000-square-foot facility that operates two shifts a day. It runs six days a week during the preparatory summer months and five when class is in session.
The offset printing operation at McCarty Street has capabilities like those of the commercial shops that the department competes with when it insources. There, a Kodak Magnus 400 platesetter driven by a Kodak Prinergy EVO workflow supports a pressroom consisting of:
• A two-color, 20x26˝ Komori Sprint
• A four-tower, 171⁄2x221⁄2˝ Didde MLC web
• A two-color AB Dick 9995
• A pair of AB Dick 9975 small-format perfectors
• An AB Dick 9810
Services in the plant's well-equipped bindery include cutting, folding, collating and saddle stitching, perfect and mechanical binding, as well as scoring, perforating, padding, and numbering.
The main plant also offers non-impact printing by means of three high-speed, black-and-white cut sheet printers from Océ: a 2110, a 6160 and a 6150 with an inline booklet maker. Océ also supplied the black-and-white 6150 and 2110 copiers and the 1520 color copier at the Spring Branch facility, and the 2110 and 2090 machines at the administration building copy center. That site also has a Konica-Minolta 650 color copier with variable-data capability.
Much of what the department produces for HISD is also the bread and butter of commercial shops: brochures, booklets, flyers, programs, letterhead, and business cards, all of it related to school district activities. Testing materials, including practice tests required by the state at all grade levels, add to the volume.
Intent Upon Insourcing
Holden says that with the exception of jobs that require embossing and foil stamping, the department seldom has to send anything to outside service providers. In any case, dollars outsourced to trade shops are just a tiny fraction of the revenue insourced from government agencies, educational organizations and not-for-profits. By selling its excess capacity to these external customers, the in-plant earned $1.3 million last year—more than 25 percent of its total budget.
However, insourcing this much volume inevitably brings the department into competition with Houston-area commercial printers pursuing the same customers.
"We go head to head with commercial almost weekly," says Holden, adding that the department continuously benchmarks its prices with those of the commercial shops it bids against. The comparisons are duly reported to HISD management.
By filling its excess capacity with work from other print buyers, says Holden, the department can toe the line on the price of services to its primary customer. She explains that because fixed overhead costs and equipment payments stay the same regardless of the amount of work being done, the price to HISD rises when chargebacks have to be spread over fewer production hours. This is why selling off unused capacity not only creates a new stream of income but stabilizes internal billing—a win for both sides of the department's business.
Changing the Copier Culture
The in-plant's success with copier-fleet management is another striking example of Holden's determination to add value to the services provided to HISD. Three years ago, during a relocation to a new building, she seized the move as an opportunity to streamline the district headquarters' photocopying assets and rewrite the rules for their use—an overhaul that has since saved HISD $125,000 in copying costs per year.
A fleet of 98 copiers was "rightsized" to 25 machines with capacities that precisely matched the workloads they would be called upon to produce. Departments that once had copiers of their own were asked to share machines deployed in common areas. Individual users were given proximity cards in the form of ID badges to use as electronic tokens for gaining access to the copiers.
In this way, every run of copies could be charged back fully and accurately to its source—an accountability that hadn't been possible until Holden and her team stepped in.
"We changed the culture of the whole facility," Holden says. She believes that by introducing these procedures in every school and office in the district, the department can save HISD $1 million annually.
In light of the innovations and the cost savings that the department has delivered for HISD, it's not surprising to hear Holden describe her primary customer as supportive and responsive. The relationship is built upon the fact that the department, operating as an "internal service fund," is seen as a self-supporting revenue center that delivers a return on the budgetary investment that HISD makes in it.
Nevertheless, Holden doesn't take the department's relationship with HISD for granted. "Nobody has to use us," she says, noting that she's required to submit an ROI statement, a business plan and a marketing plan as part of the annual budgeting process. The downside of operating like a private-sector business, she adds, is that "you can't make a loss" when print orders dip—the shortfall will have to be made up in some other way.
Next Phase Starts Here
That's one reason the in-plant is so active in its efforts to manage printing for other organizations, such as the City of Houston. The facility it runs in city hall is small—just three people and three pieces of equipment—but it has a large significance for the future direction in which Holden wants the department to go.
Besides copying and taking orders for offset printing to be done at the main plant, the city hall copy center also offers hard-copy scanning for archiving and exchange—an option that Holden will make the foundation of a plan to reposition the department as a provider of document management services.
As some parts of its printed volume decline, the department's shift to document management is a practical response to the changing nature of its role within HISD, she says. Conversion to digital has reduced or eliminated the need to print some of the school district's traditional materials. Report cards, for example, will be distributed entirely online this year, doing away with the hard-copy records carried home proudly or fearfully by generations of HISD students until now.
Like report cards, "a lot of what we used to print is going onto the Web," Holden says. "We can either stand by and watch it go away, or we can transform ourselves into specialists in other areas."
One such area is e-mail management, for which Holden and her team are creating what she calls "a huge community database" for the distribution of newsletters and other documents in electronic form.
Come what may, Holden professes faith in the top-down "entrepreneurial drive" that the HISD Printing Services Department shares with its parent organization. This, she declares, is what inspires her team's creativity and underscores their belief that no matter what the nature of the assignment, "we can do as good a job, if not better, than anyone else."
Patrick Henry is the director of Liberty or Death Communications: www.libordeath.com.
Patrick Henry is the director of Liberty or Death Communications. He is also a former Senior Editor at NAPCO Media and long time industry veteran.