Penn State-Competition In Happy Valley

Penn State University

State College, Pa.

Penn State Document Services faces a problem common to in-plants that lack the right of first refusal. If a department or professor needs a print job and they expect it to cost less than $5,000, they don't need to get bids on it.

"They can just go to the print shop down the street because it's on the way home or their cousin's best friend works there, or whatever," laments Michael Pierick, director of Document Services. "We have to compete for every job, so we need to be concerned that every product and service line we provide is a profitable one. We need to recover our expenses."

And while Pierick tries to subsidize one type of work with another by using loss leaders, like any other business, he knows he has a slim margin to work with.

"We pay for our building and our utilities, which isn't always the case with in-plants," he says. "We pay Penn State wages and benefits, so we have a better class of employees, but that also means we don't have the lowest costs in the marketplace. We pay a franchise tax [to Penn State's administration] of three cents on every dollar to cover the cost of campus police services, human resources, etc. Because of these circumstances and the need to recover every dollar that we spend, we're very cautious about the products and services that we provide."

These costs and the lack of first refusal require Pierick to concentrate on providing only mainstream products and services to the campus, located in what's known locally as Happy Valley.

"We know we won't compete well at one end of the bell curve—glory printing, the five- and six-color work—nor do we compete well at the other end of the spectrum where some of our competitors have driven costs way down," he says. "If we had a commitment of all the full color work on Penn State, we'd have enough work to make it profitable."

To help streamline production, cut costs and attract more business, Document Services has been trying to make job submission as easy as possible by searching for an easy-to-manage file transfer system. Though it started the search years ago, the responses to its initial RFP proved less than enticing, so the shop held off for a bit.

"Xerox and other vendors have developed their solutions further since then," notes Pierick, "and though [Xerox's] DigiPath isn't the perfect solution, we decided to go ahead with it. It's robust enough and flexible enough that it provides a user-friendly solution for our customers."

Document Services, whose biggest customers are the PSU alumni association, the athletics department and the College of Agricultural Sciences, is in the middle of training for its new DigiPath system now and expects to go online within the next few months. Until that day, professors and staff members at Penn State will still be able send documents as e-mail attachments or by means of FTP or HTTP over the university's intranet.

In conjunction with easier electronic file transfers, Document Services has replaced one of its DocuTechs with a new Xerox 6180. In addition to a faster throughput, Pierick says the switch "takes the scanning and prepress type functions out of the central production environment and places them in our prepress environment, which is where we believe they belong."

by W. Eric Martin

Eric Martin can be contacted at: eric@twowriters.net

Key Equipment:

• Heidelberg Duosetter Delta RIPstation

• Pixelcraft and Arcus scanners

• Kodak digital camera

• Douthitt vacuum frame

• Fuji plate processor

• Agfa direct-to-plate processor

• Tektronix Phaser 480x dye-sublimation proofing printer

• One-color 10x14˝ AM 1250 press

• Three two-color 10x14˝ AM 1250s with T-51 heads