Technology, Quality And Efficiency

"In college you learn management skills from a book. In the Navy you get hands-on experience dealing with many different types of people in very stressful situations," says Jimmy Robinson, printing department director at the University of West Alabama.

Drawing from the leadership skills he learned as print shop supervisor aboard the USS Kitty Hawk (and the strategies he read in college), Robinson has spent 19 years building this small southern in-plant into a seasoned survivor responsible for 95 percent of all the work printed by the university.

Technology, quality and efficiency, he says are the focus areas that will keep an in-plant alive.

To stay on top of technology, Robinson makes it a point to stay constantly informed about the printing industry.

"I read an awful lot," he says. "I attend ACUP (Association of College and University Printers) and SUPDMC (Southeastern University Printing and Duplicating Managers Conference). Most of the ideas I get just come from casual conversations at these conferences. But one person, about four or five years ago, gave a talk about adding color copying to the shop."

Soon after that SUPDMC conference, Robinson says, the four-employee shop added a Savin color copier. It became so popular that he has since picked up a two-color Hamada 248 among other offset equipment. The in-plant now produces all of the color work required by the university.

To ensure that the quality of the shop's work is up to par, Robinson taps into SUPDMC.

"The way I make sure our work is good is by taking it SUPDMC. When I got 'This is outstanding,' I knew we were doing a good job with it," he says.

Surprisingly, running all the four-color work through a two-color press hasn't affected the quality at all.

"I have a great press operator," lauds Robinson. "We've just had humidity problems, and I can't speak more highly of that Hamada. The registration is dot-for-dot accurate."

But the two-pass system does eat up time, and Robinson says efficiency is his shop's biggest challenge.

"What was once a two- or three- week job they now want in one week," he says. "And you can't ever fall behind. If you fall behind in this business, your days are numbered."

To make sure the shop is always running at top speed, Robinson says he eliminated the dark room and installed a RIPit imagesetter to turn out polyester plates instead.

Altogether, this focus on technology, quality and efficiency has lead the shop to accomplish some astounding feats for a facility of its size.

The shop was able to turn out 12,000 copies of a 40-page, full-color, saddle-stitched book for the admissions department right on time. Robinson is also proud that the shop is able to receive a class schedule over the network, incorporate it into PageMaker, output it to polyester plates, print 5,500 copies of the 40-page job, collate it and saddle-stitch it in less than three days.

Robinson makes sure the University knows what the in-plant can do, but he markets the shop's services very carefully.

"We don't flood people with e-mail—we've seen how that can turn people off," he says. "We put questionnaires in with jobs, and we send out coupons printed off our Xerox DocuColor 12."

It has all paid off. Working under a chargeback system, not only has the shop always recovered its costs, it has become a respected fixture on the West Alabama campus, as well.

—by Mike Llewellyn