Movin' On Up

This year's sales leaders shine despite budget cuts, a tough economy and the migration from print to e-formats.

By Mike Llewellyn

2003 WILL likely go down in history as a little kinder than 2002's nasty economic climate. But hiring is still slow and budgets are still tight. Nonetheless, there are once again a number of Top 50 in-plants that managed to find ways to increase their sales—24 of them, in fact. Many opted to offer new services. Others took on extra responsibilities within their organizations. Some turned to outside business, while others did a little extra self-promotion.

Whatever strategies they've used, these in-plants have in common a careful eye for what their customers are after, and they've provided it with the low cost and the excellent customer service that put them at the top of the list to begin with.

Financial Services Lead The Pack

Posting the largest increase in sales this year—a whopping 90 percent—is ING, in Des Moines. But don't get too excited, says Manager Tim Steenhoek; a shift in accounting that gave the in-plant the paper-buying budget accounts for a big piece of that percentage. Still, that shouldn't detract from the shop's 15 percent growth otherwise, which continues a trend it has followed for the past several years.

"For the most part, we've increased volume in fulfillment," says Steenhoek. "As ING's market presence increases, there's an increased demand for sales materials."

Steenhoek says activity and transactions are on the rise around his company's financial services products, particularly communications to customers. To keep up with that need, the in-plant installed new Xerox equipment, and it will completely overhaul its bindery this fall.

"We're going to be building a new bindery department," he says. "We're getting so diverse that we need a whole department."

John Hancock Financial Services is the other major financial firm topping the list this year. Based in Hyde Park, Mass., just outside of Boston, the in-plant recently added a new lineup of Océ equipment to handle the nightly arrival of thousands of print and mail jobs.

"Our growth was driven more by added operations, record services and imaging," says Scott London, general director of Hancock's Document Solutions Group, which posted a 26.62 percent increase in sales this year. He reports that the in-plant is now responsible for the long-term storage and retrieval of documents, as well as document scanning.

The operation's sales were also padded nicely by its insourcing business, which jumped from around $100,000 last year to nearly $1 million this year.

London says that leap is mainly attributable to a contract the shop has with a large area business that needed to tap into the Document Solutions Group's sizable mailing capabilities. Additionally, the in-plant is handling overflow work from a joint venture between John Hancock and Metropolitan Life Insurance.

Success Comes In Threes

At the City of San Francisco's Reproduction and Mail Services department, Manager David German says his municipal in-plant's 14.48 percent increase in sales is due to three major factors.

"We have been actively insourcing work, we've seen the demand for color go up, and we're offering Web design," he lists.

As for insourcing, the shop is hammering out agreements with the city school district and surrounding counties to handle some of their printing work. Although insourcing is making up just over 7 percent of the in-plant's revenue, that's still $600,000 in sales, and German says he expects that number to increase considerably next year.

Getting started in the insourcing game wasn't too difficult, he says.

"And we just cold-called [the customers]," says German.

Meanwhile, color work has been increasing at 20 percent annually for the past two-and-a-half years, largely due to an HP-Indigo digital press that German says makes color work a lot more affordable for his customers.

"Color is growing mainly because people want it for presentation work," he says, adding that customers increasingly see value in short-run color work.

The third factor in the sales increase—Web design—is an initiative the in-plant has been chasing down for three years now.

"We have a dedicated Web designer and we have created and maintain about 30 sites," he says.

Those sites belong to city agencies like the fire department, the city symphony and the Department of Environment.

"We saw Web design as a change that would offer a combination of services we already provided. That way we get back some of what got away," says German, referring to the migration of many print jobs to electronic formats.

Continued Growth

Another in-plant offering a trio of reasons for its continued success is Best Buy's Print Solutions Group (PSG), based in Eden Prairie, Minn.

Printing Services Director Rick Neumann says the most important influence on his numbers is a series of company initiatives that required the shop to jump to 5,000 jobs a month and add a fourth shift. The initiatives, which Neumann says the company is keeping hush-hush for the moment, kept the shop busy from late June through October.

Adding to that workload is the fact that Best Buy's store count continues to expand, with the company opening new outlets for its consumer electronics merchandise every month.

"This industry is changing so quickly, and the promotional end of that has to keep up," Neumann says.

Part of keeping up is adding to the in-plant's stock of wide-format equipment used to print a large amount of the retailer's store signage. Neumann credits increasing demand for wide-format jobs with pushing the sales increase to the 19.89 percent mark, where it rests this year.

Essential To The Mission

Best Buy's in-plant is a strong one because it ties so closely to the mission of its parent—opening stores where people want to shop. Likewise, Debbie Pavletich and her team at Briggs and Stratton also promote themselves as being an essential part of the company's mission. They're busy printing the books that go in the boxes with the equipment the company manufactures.

"We produce technical documents, mainly manuals. And since Briggs & Stratton had a really good year, so did we," she says.

The in-plant has also focused on streamlining its workflow. That directive included the installation of a computer-to-plate system and was designed to increase print quality, speed turnaround times and lower the cost of printing.

"For that the marketing department awarded us additional business," says Pavletich.

Finally, with a 23-percent increase in outside sales this year, the Wisconsin in-plant cites insourcing as a major contributor to its sales growth. Marketing its services to businesses and equipment dealers in the southeastern portion of the state, Pavletich says the increase is simply the result of hard work paying off.

"We have very diligent salespeople and we've just been showing our capabilities," she says.

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Sales Growth

Here are the top in-plants according to sales growth compared with 2002 figures: