How Inkjet and Automation are Shaping the Future of the GPO

Asked why the U.S. Government Publishing Office (GPO) places such a high priority on innovation, Greg Estep gets right to the point.

“If you don’t innovate, you won’t be relevant,” says Estep, managing director of plant operations at the 163-year-old agency, the federal government’s official printer and publisher. “You can’t use the same solutions you used years ago when people were available.”

GPO’s Canon VarioPrint i200 cut-sheet inkjet press handles items like book covers, visitor badges, immigration cards, stationery, and pamphlets.

GPO has suffered the same labor shortages as the rest of the printing industry, but has used them as a catalyst to innovate. It has shed labor-intensive equipment in favor of automated printing and binding technology, reconfigured its workforce using a telework model to attract top talent, incorporated artificial intelligence and XML-based publishing into its workflow, and created a Herculean archive of digitized historic materials stretching back to the nation’s founding. What’s more, Estep says, the Washington, D.C.-based operation has several high-tech, automated presses and bindery lines in its plans, as well as a vision to use cobots (collaborative robots) to handle menial tasks.

GPO’s innovations in automation, technology, and labor practices have combined to make the agency one of Printing Impressions’ 2024 Innovators of the Year.

“The Government Publishing Office is an amazing operation, an in-plant with tight and firm deadlines serving as our nation’s producer of official records,” praises Marco Boer, vice president of IT Strategies. “They’ve been able to effectively double their efficiency in the last decade by operating with about 50% fewer employees than 10 years ago. A large part of the efficiency gains have come from adding production inkjet technology, allowing them to reduce the amount of labor previously needed for short- to-mid-run offset jobs.”

The Offset to Inkjet Transition

GPO’s transition from aging web offset presses to slick inkjet devices has been one of the most visible manifestations of its innovation. In November 2019, GPO made headlines by installing four Canon ColorStream 6900 inkjet presses and one Canon VarioPrint i200 cut-sheet inkjet press to replace six Hantscho web offset presses. Deciding to print such important publications as the Congressional Record and Federal Register with inkjet instead of offset was a brave move, but one that the agency undertook with confidence.

Tim Hart inspects a stitched copy of the Congressional Record being finished on GPO’s roll-to-stitch line, which consists of a Hunkeler UW6 Unwinder into a Hunkeler cutter, separator, and stacker, into a Horizon Stitchliner and a Horizon HT-30 three-knife trimmer.

“These presses are an investment in GPO’s future,” declared GPO Director Hugh Nathanial Halpern in 2020 after the inkjet presses were used to print the Congressional Record for the first time. “They vastly enhance our flexibility to meet our customers’ needs for both large and small jobs.”

The ColorStream 6900s not only print the Congressional Record, but also the Federal Register, Senate and House reports, hearings, budgets, bills, the congressional directory, and more. The VarioPrint i200 handles book covers, visitor badges, immigration cards, forms, stationery, and pamphlets.

“The reliability is just unbelievable,” Estep praises. Since installation of the inkjet presses, GPO’s on-time delivery has improved from 89% to 95%, he says. And where it took six operators to run a web press, he says, just one person can run an inkjet press and the work comes out faster.

He and his team researched inkjet extensively and were impressed with its up-time, throughput, quality, and automation.

“The Inkjet Summit was golden for me,” he says. There, he got an in-depth education about the technology and established industry relationships that proved vital in making final decisions.

More Than Just Printing

For all its printing firepower, however, printing is not all GPO does. Today’s GPO is more of an information dissemination organization than a printer. Data is collected, proofread, and structured so it looks good across multiple formats, whether on paper, a tablet, a phone, or a laptop.

IPI Editor Bob Neubauer (center) talks with Director Hugh Halpern (right) and Ravinder Birdi, Manager of Press and Bindery, in the Government Publishing Office pressroom.

“We provide the data created by the government in a myriad of different ways,” Halpern notes.

That data might end up in a printed book, but it will also go online at GovInfo.gov to allow free public access. GovInfo offers about 2.5 million publications, and GPO adds 3,000 documents to GovInfo per week. To ensure the public that digital materials are authentic and trustworthy, GPO has earned CoreTrustSeal certification and annually re-certifies its ISO 16363:2012 certification.

One key GPO innovation is its transition from a decades-old proprietary composition system (Microcomp) to XML-based publishing using a new digital technology called XPub, which allows it to create, edit, proof, approve, and simultaneously publish legislative documents in a variety of print and digital formats, optimized for any device. XPub uses modern fonts optimized for screen usage and search engines. It creates responsive HTML files that include metadata.

GPO also digitizes printed information from the past, such as historic volumes of the Congressional Directory, the public papers of presidents, U.S. Statutes at Large dating back to 1789, the Declaration of Independence, Articles of Confederation, the Constitution, and many others. These too are available on GovInfo.gov.

Another example of GPO’s innovation is its use of artificial intelligence. It currently uses it to increase the accuracy of GPO procurements, freeing up time for contract specialists; to assist in writing headlines in routine communications; to recognize cyberattacks in real time; to automatically reject passport pages that don’t meet quality specifications; to correct common copyediting issues; to help librarians catalog materials; and to display information in more accessible formats.

A Printer at Heart

IPI Editor Bob Neubauer (center) walks past the inkjet presses at the Government Publishing Office with Director Hugh Halpern (right), Abe Sussan (left) and other GPO staff. | Credit: Aaron Sweet, GPO

Printing, though, remains at its core, and the printing GPO does inside its multi-story red brick facility in Washington is accomplished under very tight deadlines. Every night, GPO’s staff assembles the proceedings of all sessions of Congress that day into the Congressional Record, which must be printed, bound, and delivered prior to the start of the new legislative day. Though the average Record is 90 pages, it can exceed 300 pages. GPO prints about 1,500 copies overnight, while also printing the Federal Register, bills, statutes, House and Senate calendars, and more. The speed at which it turns these items around, while also making them available digitally, has made GPO an invaluable asset to the country.

“We’re providing services that, frankly, are going to be hard to find in a traditional private-sector printing operation,” Halpern notes.

Accompanying the inkjet presses and enabling further automation are several Standard Hunkeler/Horizon bindery lines. They have enabled virtually touch-free unwinding, folding, trimming, and binding. One system unwinds a roll of printed material into a plow folder, cutters, and a Horizon BQ-480 four-clamp perfect binder to produce finished books. A Hunkeler Vision System gives operators a view of individual pages as they stream past, letting them spot-check for problems. GPO produces about 20,000 books per month on the line. A similar line creates saddle-stitched booklets from a roll. Soon to come is a roll-to-sew line to create bound books from a printed roll, as well as a roll-to-book solution to facilitate the transfer of web offset work to inkjet.

On the offset side, GPO intends to install an eight-color Koenig & Bauer UV-LED press in the fall chock-full of automated features, including predictive analysis, camera monitoring of sheets, auto plate changing, in-line color management, and machine learning capabilities.

GPO has used its spirit of innovation to solve maintenance issues by printing needed machine parts with a 3D printer. It has printed plastic catch fingers for finishing equipment, bushings for plate processors, feeder hold-downs for sheetfed presses, and more.

‘We’re Looking for Automation’

At drupa, the GPO team spotted the W+D i-Jet 3 digital envelope press, and made plans to install one in August, to move envelope printing from its Halmjet presses, which take nearly a half hour to set up.

“We’re looking for automation, we’re looking for reliability,” Estep says.

Automation is now a necessity as retirements reduce GPO’s ranks. Today there are 453 employees in the plant, he says, down 57 from FY 2021.

But as inkjet and automated bindery lines reduce the need for operators, this has created opportunities to hire experts in other areas, such as business process engineers to help with the implementation of its Pace MIS from eProductivity Software, as well as with XPub. GPO’s pandemic-inspired embrace of telework has expanded its ability to hire experts who work remotely.

“It opens up my ability to get talent,” says Estep.

Today, about a third of GPO workers are doing telework. GPO’s ready embrace of remote work was a key reason it was named one of America’s best employers by Forbes three years in a row. The telework option has strengthened GPO’s Recent Graduate Program, which allows GPO to develop well-educated, highly motivated individuals to fill critical positions while providing training, mentorship, and growth opportunities. About 70% of these recent graduates are eligible to work remotely. Halpern sees the program as a critical element of securing GPO’s future.

“Working at GPO is a pretty decent gig,” Halpern remarks — and he intends to keep it this way. “Retaining teammates is really key because replacing them is really expensive, and we want to make sure that it’s a good place to work.”