Majoring in Success

University of Washington Publications Services, Seattle

Annual sales: $15.8 million

Operating budget: $16.2 million

Full-time employees: 162

Part-time employees: 110

Jobs printed per year: 6,500

At 48,000 square feet in size and with 270 full- and part-time employees, University of Washington Publications Services is a monster of a university in-plant. And Acting Director Frank Davis predicts it will only get bigger—in terms of services, if nothing else.

Of course, when you're serving a campus of 36,000 students and 18,000 faculty and staff members, it's hard to keep things on a small scale.

Take color printing for example: A year ago, the Copy Services division averaged 10,000 to 15,000 color copies per month on its Xerox DocuColor 40; this past month, it did more than 53,000.

"We expect to see a lot more color in the next five years or so, more digital color and at a higher quality," says Davis, who's been filling in for Director Eric Mosher for almost a year. Davis is already thinking about adding another DocuColor to keep up with demand.

Another area of growth for Publications Services will be managing laser printing in the libraries and university computing labs. These areas used to provide free laser printing to students, but the past few years have brought huge increases in printing costs, particularly from students taking advantage of the vast research material available over the Internet.

"There's been a huge shift to laser printing, and the libraries and labs just can't afford it," says Davis. Publications Services is preparing to install software that will enable these departments to charge students via a card or cash system for each page that they print. "This should be a growth area for us in the next few years," he says.

Not every change will be so dramatic. On a purely aesthetic note, Publications Services recently purchased DigiPath software so that it can number pages, eliminate skew and despeckle fourth-generation course packs—all of which make for a more professional-looking package.

Davis also expects the Internet to play a bigger role in terms of customer service. To give an example, Davis says that today students might have to go to three different copy centers to pick up three different course packs.

"Next year we hope to have the Web site set up so that students can order their course packs online and pick them all up at the copy center of their choice," he says.

Even with an increasing color load and new services, Davis predicts that he'll need fewer employees to handle the load.

"Thanks to technology, we've been able to keep staff at the same level for the past 10 years," he says, boasting that reductions in staff levels have resulted from attrition, not dismissals. Only the computer support department has increased its number of employees.

The technology that has made this change possible is the near-universal use of networking and digital files. Davis says that the university has had 16 copy centers for more than a decade, but "we now use fewer people, and we can turn out better quality work with a faster turnaround."

The Mailing Services department, which handles all incoming and outgoing regular mail, plus inter-campus service, has also seen big changes in the past five years. In addition to the slap-on labels of old, ink-jet technology is now used to print the mailing address and bar code, verify the zip-plus-four and sort the outgoing mail.

More recent equipment allows the department to bar code and sort pre-addressed mail. As a result, Mailing Services can send most of its mail at automated rates, saving clients thousands of dollars in postage weekly.

With that kind of success, Davis and the rest of Publications Services certainly deserve an "A" for effort.

—by W. Eric Martin

Key Equipment

• Agfa Avantra 30 OPL large-format imagesetter with in-line processor

• 28x41˝ MAN-Miller TP-104

• 20x29˝ MAN-Miller TP-74

• 14x20˝ Shinohara

• Heidelberg flatbed letterpress

• Three networked Xerox DocuTechs

• One Xerox DocuColor 40

• Two Canon CLC 550 digital color copiers

• 25 assorted high-speed Xerox copiers