To Build Strategic Relevance, Look Outside Your Organization

About half of in-plants insource work, says Steve Adoniou, director of Consulting, Forecasting and Research at InfoTrends. "In-plants probably are not going to grow dramatically," he says, "but they need a certain critical mass to have volume to justify reinvesting in the operation."

At the Rochester Institute of Technology's (RIT) HUB Print & Postal Services, insourcing is doing just that: making up for some of the business erosion the in-plant has experienced for the last three or four years. While long-run offset jobs are declining, Director John Meyer has found growth in short-run digital color printing and in insourcing, which has grown from about 5 percent of the work six years ago to about 15 percent today.