San Diego Chargers

When the City of San Diego's in-plant sees an opportunity, it rushes right in to take advantage of it. The resulting mix of services, both traditional and nontraditional, has kept customers happy.

by CAROLINE MILLER

Not only is variety the spice of life for the City of San Diego's in-plant. It's also the key to its success.

"We've found that we've had to continually reinvent ourselves, and that like all good in-plants we have to always anticipate the needs of our customers before our customers do," says Liam McGuigan, deputy director of the general services department for the City of San Diego.

Situated just five miles from the Pacific Ocean, the 37-employee in-plant has an ideal location; the surfers on staff don't have far to go when they leave at 4:00 to catch the last waves of the day. In the other direction, the San Jacinto mountain range lures the staff's avid hikers. Meanwhile, just 15 miles from the facility, Mexico and the Baja Peninsula await those seeking a more international flavor.

But despite the outdoor attractions, the near-constant sunshine, and warm temperatures that allow employees to come to work in shorts and T-shirts—even in winter—the inside of the in-plant is a busy place. With a $6.5 million budget, the operation offers offset printing and copying, as well as graphic design, prepress and bindery services.

But the in-plant has also stepped into new territory by offering Web design (the in-plant designed the city's Web site), digital asset management and promotional products. The department also recently acquired a networked Océ TDS 600 large-format printer to enable it to electronically transfer and print schematic designs for the water and utilities departments, says McGuigan.

Despite this abundance of capabilities, though, getting the word out to city departments about the services available to them can be a challenge.

"I go to a lot of the management meetings, so I know what they are doing and what they will be doing," McGuigan says. "That puts us in a unique position to help departments solve problems, [and] offer solutions and suggestions that are cheaper, quicker and better."

A recent project with the city auditor's office is just one example of how the in-plant serves as a proactive force within San Diego. The auditor's office needed a more efficient way to look at the city's time cards. Previously, the time cards were stored in boxes throughout the city. The in-plant designed a Web-based imaging system, under the leadership of James Carter, an electronic publishing specialist, where all the time cards were scanned into a system that allows the auditor's office to look at them in an organized and efficient manner via the Web.

Evolving With The Changes

Taking on non-traditional projects, such as the time card issue, also enables the in-plant to continue to evolve with the needs of the city.

"We used to print a tremendous amount of black-and-white forms for the city. But with the move toward the paperless office—such as the police department moving to laptop computers—a lot of our traditional work has gone away. We've had to evolve," McGuigan says. "We now print a lot of short-run color and promotional work, such as posters, baseball caps and T-shirts. We recently purchased an HP D5000 printer so we could print banners."

The need to anticipate customer needs, as well as expand the in-plant's offerings, comes in part because the 26,000-square-foot facility is a complete chargeback operation.

"All of our costs are self-contained," notes McGuigan.

Still, The chargeback system is a strength of the in-plant, not a hindrance, says McGuigan.

"It pushes us to be more private-sector-oriented and make sure that we get things as cost-effective as possible," he reveals. "We've found that we are able to get things done expeditiously and cheap compared to outside commercial printers. We keep our costs minimal, and we are successful at it. We are anywhere from 30 to 40 percent below outside commercial printers. But it is always a challenge to keep costs down.

"If we find out that someone is doing it cheaper, we ask ourselves how they are doing it. Did they get new machinery, or how did they improve their process? We always ask ourselves what we might be doing wrong and then try to find the right solution."

The in-plant's ability to keep costs down while producing excellent work has been noticed outside of the city, as well. The in-plant is regularly invited to bid on outside government contracts, and it does work for several government agencies in San Diego county. While it is nice to be noticed by the outside world for the work the shop produces, insourcing also fits well with McGuigan's theme of efficiency.

"We have quite a bit of capacity here. It does supplement our production. With the additional work, we are able to increase our utilization rates, and the more volume we have, the lower the costs to our city departments," he says.

The call to efficiency is not just an in-plant goal; it's part of an ongoing city-wide goal, says McGuigan.

"We have to be efficient. The city has [nearly] the lowest ratio of employees to 1,000 residents among the top 50 cities. It's always a crunch to get things done, so we have to look at every angle possible," he says.

Mean And Lean

Running a mean and lean in-plant comes naturally for McGuigan, who spent much of his career with the city's financial management department as part of a productivity improvement program, before being promoted to deputy budget director for the financial management department.

When the in-plant manager position opened up, McGuigan jumped at the chance, despite having no print background.

"I really ended up loving it because it is the closest I could come to running my own business," he reports.

In addition to his in-plant responsibilities, McGuigan also oversees the city's central stores division, as well as its centralized copier program and two satellite copy centers. Central stores—in addition to including city-wide radio dispatch functions and surplus property disposal/auctions—encompasses the city's mail services operation. McGuigan keeps in close contact with the supervisor in mail services.

"If we get a job to print and send out 240,00 brochures on recycling Christmas trees, I start planning the end of the process to ensure that the project will go out as efficiency as possible," he explains. "I call our mail services supervisor and discuss what our designers need to do on their end to ensure that the job goes smoothly."

Improving Workflow

McGuigan is always looking for ways to encourage better workflow. The in-plant currently uses Avanti management software. McGuigan plans to add Avanti's Web-based browser capabilities to begin online ordering in the next year. The new Avanti system will let clients create their own job tickets and eventually monitor the status of their jobs.

"It's giving information feedback to our customers," he proclaims. "It improves that communication link with the customer. Today they want to be able to get their jobs back as soon as possible. Jobs that used to take three weeks now need to be completed in five days or less. This enables us to meet tighter and tighter deadlines. Plus, as desktop publishing has become more and more prevalent, customers expect to be able to order online."

The in-plant's bindery has also been impacted by the demand for tighter and tighter deadlines, reports McGuigan.

"We noticed that despite all of the operational improvements that we've made around here, jobs were still getting sidelined in the bindery," he says.

To address that issue, the city purchased a Standard Horizon bookletmaker at Print 01.

"We really zeroed in on the Standard bookletmaker because we felt it could address all of our issues," he says. "We've cut the time of getting a job through the bindery by 80 percent."

Although the bindery has been his focus as of late, McGuigan is always looking to the future.

"We are always thinking and looking for ways to meet the demands of our customers, anticipate their needs and solve their problems," he says. "We have very customer-service-oriented employees. They come to work every day and do everything they can to meet the needs of our customers. If we didn't have that commitment from our in-plant employees, we would not be here."