LifeWay In-plant Moves to New Facility

Standing with the four-color Shinohara press inside Print and Mail Services’ new facility are (from left) Kevin Durr, Larry Tomlin, Jerry King and Jeff Anderson.

The future of an in-plant rests on its perceived value. So when an investment is made to move the printing, binding and mailing equipment of an in-plant to a new location, it’s safe to assume that the in-plant is doing something right.

For LifeWay Christian Resources Print and Mail Services, the move to a new warehouse space made sense for the company, so in February, the team settled into a former Toshiba warehouse in Lebanon, Tenn.

Jeff Anderson, Print and Mail supervisor at LifeWay Christian Resources, explains that the key to minimizing downtime during the move was to relocate the equipment in phases. For example, since the shop has two digital color printers and two black-and-white printers, one of each was moved to the new facility and set up while the other two continued to run at the old plant. After all was said and done, Anderson explains that there was only about a week of downtime during the move.

The largest pieces of equipment that needed to be moved were Print and Mail Services’ four-color, 19x25˝ Shinohara offset press and a six-pocket Burhs BB700 inserting machine. But with the help of vendors and two companies specializing in moving and servicing equipment, the shop’s printing, binding, mailing and platesetting equipment was moved to the new warehouse space without any major kinks in the plan.

Although the new facility is roughly the same size as the old shop floor, the biggest advantage of the move is that it allowed Print and Mail Services to reconfigure the way the space would be utilized.

“We had the opportunity to reset the production floor in a way that is more workflow friendly,” Anderson says.

Now, all of the printing equipment is on one side of the facility, while the raw materials and incoming paper live on the other side. As jobs are printing, they move through the plant into bindery, inserting and then mailing in a fluid motion.

“[The staff] likes it, but a change of location is always hard,” Anderson admits.

The move was scheduled to avoid peak printing times, Anderson says, particularly those times when LifeWay would be the busiest with statements, invoices, order forms, marketing materials, postcards and brochures.

Inside Lifeway's new in-plant facility

“We also print a good bit of signage that goes in the bookstores,” Anderson says. “We have 173 bookstores nationwide. So we’re printing all of the shelf strips, signs and things that are in the Lifeway Christian stores.”

Print and Mail Services is now looking into wide-format printing, a service it currently outsources, though plans are not definite.

Although the move didn’t go perfectly — Anderson cited some run-of-the-mill problems, such as electrical issues — it went well based on the standards of moving an entire print shop.

“Obviously moving equipment is never a fun thing to do,” he laughs. “But it went as well as can be expected.”