A Leaner, Meaner State Printer
IF YOU look back at some of the large in-plants IPG profiled in the ’90s, you’ll quickly observe that nearly all of them have gotten smaller in the intervening years.
And busier.
Such is the case with one of the largest of them all: the California Office of State Publishing (OSP).
When IPG ran a cover story on the colossal Sacramento printer in July of 1995, it had 540 employees. Today it employs 326. Yet revenues have gone from $56 million back then to $65 million today.
State Printer Geoff Brandt says the staff shrinkage started around 1998 when the state lifted a mandate requiring all state printing to go to OSP. The workload dropped. Then, as e-filing of taxes came into vogue, the printing of tax forms also took a hit.
When we profiled the in-plant in 2003—just after state budget woes had helped oust the governor and usher in Arnold Schwarzenegger to sort things out—print orders to OSP had dropped 35 percent from the previous year, and staff was down to 416. Times were tough then; the in-plant wasn’t recovering its costs, and it was preparing to downsize.
A lot has changed in just five years. Between 2004 and 2005, Brandt says, OSP reduced its employee count to 325. This helped put the in-plant in the black, and it has been financially solvent ever since. Then last year OSP got its mandate back, and once again all state agencies must send their printing to the in-plant. Revenue is on the rise.
What’s more, a major new contract from the Department of Child Support Services (DCSS) has brought in so much work that OSP has had to expand its Digital Print Center into a new 40,000-square-foot facility. The move consolidated the in-plant’s Kodak NexPress 2100, two Océ printers, two new Danka 150s and three high-speed Pitney Bowes and Böwe Bell + Howell inserters. The equipment had previously been somewhat scattered around the main 300,000-square-foot plant.
“We had to put the machines anywhere we had room,” says Brandt.
The new DCSS contract is worth $62 million over five years, which will translate to a lot of digital printing for OSP.
The Digital Print Center isn’t the only thing being relocated. The entire OSP operation is scheduled to move in 2011. This has been in the plans for years, but OSP is actually working with architects now and a site search is to begin later this month.
In the years since our 1995 article, the type of work OSP handles has shifted a bit. Forms dropped from one-seventh to one-tenth of all printed projects and color work jumped from 40 to 50 percent.
“We’ve got an incredible increase in workload on our six-color Heidelberg,” Brandt says. This includes high-end publications, brochures and posters.
OSP also started printing business card digitally, using its NexPress. It produces variable data printing and uses bar codes to track sheets at each stage of processing, from submission to mailing. And it added video and multimedia capabilities to make training and marketing videos.
As in 1995, OSP still handles all printing for the state legislature, including bills and journals, to the tune of $6.5 million annually. Other major clients include the Department of Motor Vehicles and the Secretary of State. It serves 170 agencies in all.
Bob has served as editor of In-plant Impressions since October of 1994. Prior to that he served for three years as managing editor of Printing Impressions, a commercial printing publication. Mr. Neubauer is very active in the U.S. in-plant industry. He attends all the major in-plant conferences and has visited more than 180 in-plant operations around the world. He has given presentations to numerous in-plant groups in the U.S., Canada and Australia, including the Association of College and University Printers and the In-plant Printing and Mailing Association. He also coordinates the annual In-Print contest, co-sponsored by IPMA and In-plant Impressions.
