What's Next for the In-plant?

Ensuring Your Survival

The majority of in-plants have three broad options available that can help ensure their survival and prosperity:

1. They can seek to broaden their offering to their host organization—this can be through increased efficiencies, adoption of new technology, outward facing customer service and innovation.
2. They can look for supplementary work outside the host to supply additional revenue and margin—likely to be targeted at establishments within their geographical area. For government-controlled establishments the potential impact of such activity may have to be checked by the legal team (certainly within the UK there are legislative restrictions).
3. Those based within educational establishments also have a third option: enhancing and/or increasing their offering to the student base.

What is certain is that whichever of these options are pursued, a very outward-facing sales culture is a must. No longer can in-plants wait for customers to come to them. Instead, the team must proactively seek to communicate with customers, possibly engaging sales staff to carry out this function. If not already in place, the adoption of online ordering systems (Web-to-print) can ease communication with the customer base and should be explored fully.