From the Editor: Penn State Road Trip

Autumn is such a beautiful time for a road trip across the rolling hills of central Pennsylvania. But leaf peeping is not what brought me out to Penn State, my alma mater, recently. The university’s Multimedia & Print Center, one of the country’s largest in-plants, held a two-day open house, and I decided to check it out.

The first person I ran into when I walked through the front door was MPC Director Abbas Badani, who had just finished giving his boss the grand tour. This, he told me later, is one of the prime reasons to hold an open house: to show off your capabilities to upper management.

Standing with managers of Penn State's and Bucknell University's in-plants.

“The folks I report to, they were so impressed by the facility, my boss sent out an email to the whole division ... telling everybody to come and visit to see what a great job that the staff here are doing,” he told me with pride. That’s some serious credibility.

Penn State’s in-plant has been around since the 1930s, but to this day, Abbas said, some campus departments don’t even know it exists. Those were the very folks he was targeting with this open house: the administrative and support staff who are in charge of getting projects printed.

Throughout my two-day visit, groups of university employees (and a few in-plant managers from other universities) streamed through the door of the Hostetter Business Services Building on the north side of campus (a place I confess I never knew about when I was a student). They sat through short seminars on topics like online stationery setup and ordering, visual identity standards and preparing data files for mailing. They were led through the vast 48,000-sq.-ft. facility, making stops in prepress, the pressroom (where the new four-color, 23×29˝ Ryobi press was pumping out pages), the digital press area, bindery and mail. But it was the wide-format printing and dye-sublimation room that seemed to impress visitors the most.

One full wall of the room is wrapped with an impressive graphic — printed on the in-plant’s 64˝ HP Latex 330 printer — that makes the wall look like an art museum, covered with framed artwork above a strip of chair rail. The image of the chair rail in the print is so realistic I had to go up and touch it to be sure it was really printed. Staff showed off decals being diecut with the shop’s Graphtec contour cutter, and they pointed out the in-plant’s “Personalize It” line of dye-sub products, such as mugs, shirts, blankets, socks and more, all produced in the shop.

When customers see new capabilities like these, Abbas said, they will keep them in mind and call the in-plant first when they have a need for such items — or even better, they’ll create a need for them. At least that’s the hope. After all, self promotion is one of the main reasons to hold an open house.