Borderline Victory: DI Press Brings Work In-house

It's a familiar story: an organization needs the space occupied by its in-plant, so the in-plant is sent packing. Most of the time no studies are done on whether this is a cost-effective plan; an administrator just makes the call, leaving the in-plant's customers to deal with the aftermath as best they can.

That's not exactly how it played out at the University of Texas-Pan American, though.

"Our Printing Services production area was displaced when the university needed the space for a new civil engineering program," relates Robert Cantu, associate director of Auxiliary Services, which includes Printing Services. "This started a discussion about whether the university needed an in-plant in light of the investment that would be required to retrofit any new space we might be assigned."

So the Edinburg, Texas, university, which lies about 20 miles north of the U.S./Mexico border, issued a Request for Proposal to outsource the operation, to see if there would actually be any cost savings for the 86-year-old university, which serves nearly 20,000 students with a faculty of about 800.

"All of the responses we received were print management proposals, which would be more expensive than internally operating our own services," reports Cantu. "That left us with the opportunity to refresh our production platform as we made the move to an off-campus production location."

At the time these discussions were occurring, Print Services was already outsourcing most of its four-color printing. The in-plant had an older one-color Heidelberg offset press with chemistry-based platemaking, as well as a Xerox Docu­Color 242 and a Xerox 4127 black-and-white printer.

"The issue we were facing with this production platform was long lead times on color work produced in-house with less-than-optimal quality. Or, alternatively, exceeding our cap on clicks with the DocuColor 242, which raised our costs to an unacceptable level," Cantu says. "In addition, we faced the usual issues of lack of control over schedules and quality for work we were outsourcing."

The Move into Direct Imaging

Cantu and his team ultimately selected a Presstek 34DI as the perfect complement to the shop's color and black-and-white copiers.

"This was a win/win for us in a number of ways," Cantu points out. "We moved into a university-owned building in town. Although we have lots of space, we were able to economize by building a relatively small room for the DI press that limited the amount of HVAC we needed. This kept our retrofitting costs low."

Cantu was also pleased with the small environmental footprint of the Presstek 34DI and its reduced VOCs with chemistry-free on-press platemaking, fast makeready and waterless printing technology.

"Environmental sustainability is very important to the university," he says, "and that made the approval process easier."

In addition to its Xerox printers and the Presstek 34DI, Print Services also sports an Epson Stylus Pro GS6000 for wide-format printing, plus a full bindery that includes trimmers, collators, stitchers and more. The shop uses a PDF workflow and the Adobe Creative Suite.

"Our PDF workflow ensures that there is seamless communication between our on-campus designers and customer service staff, and our off-campus printing facility," Cantu says.

According to Cantu, the Presstek 34DI was the cornerstone piece of equipment that enabled the shop to reestablish itself in its new location and continue providing services to the university.

"I am not exaggerating," he insists, "when I say that the Presstek DI press was an important component in saving our operation. It was the ideal piece of equipment to complement our Xerox and Epson printers and has enabled us to bring just about everything in-house. Our designers are cognizant of the sheet size of our production platform, and they are very good at designing for our existing equipment base to keep our level of outsourced work to a minimum."

Keeping Print Work In-house

Concurrent with the move, a change was made to the university's procurement system that funnels all requests for promotional or printing-related purchases directly to Printing Services for approval.

"We always had first right of refusal, but we didn't have a mechanism to capture purchases, so there was a lot of work going off-campus that we didn't know about," Cantu explains. "Now we are in a position to decide whether something needs to be outsourced or not, which has allowed us to save the university a significant amount of money."

One of the advantages to keeping print production in-house, according to Cantu, is that the Printing Services team has the flexibility to prioritize work in the best interests of the university.

"If we get an important job from the president's office," he says, "we can interrupt what we are doing to get it out right away. That is harder to do when you are working with an outsourced vendor that has multiple priorities to juggle.

"We are also doing large jobs that we never would have done in-house before," says Cantu. "For example, we just finished a booklet job for student financial services that required 12,500 copies. We also ran 200,000 postcards for one of our departments. Even if we have to image new plates for long runs, it is still more cost effective than outsourcing or the process we had before. And our customers have been very satisfied with the quality and turnaround time we can now deliver.

"The DI has allowed us to link our competencies to the university's overall goals," he continues. "We're feeling pretty secure about continuing to be a part of the university, delivering vital services at a very reasonable cost."

Cantu also comments that the in-plant's press operators, both of whom have been in the business for more than 25 years, are thrilled with the quality and productivity they can achieve with the Presstek 34DI.

"You can imagine," he says, "what a difference it made going from production of four-color work on a one-color press using film-based platemaking to the operation of an all-in-one digital offset press. It is like night and day. And since we must be self-supporting, keeping our costs in line with improved efficiency is a critical success factor for us. With our new location and our updated production portfolio, we are doing just that, and providing a better level of services to the university than ever before."