Stronger Than Ever
When IPG wrote about Colonial Life & Accident Insurance Co. in May of 1994, its in-plant was in the midst of a major forms management initiative. The Columbia, S.C., shop was moving its forms printing from offset presses to a new Xerox DocuTech and had come up with a groundbreaking solution where forms were stored as PostScript files on a server and printed on demand.
Upper management was excited about the new DocuTech. The in-plant was looking forward to reducing warehouse inventory. All signs pointed to a successful future for the in-plant.
Then came some unexpected curve balls.
First, Colonial Life was purchased by Unum Group, a major provider of employee benefits. Unum consolidated the in-plant with its own. Then in 1999, Unum outsourced forms management, production and fulfillment to R.R. Donnelley & Sons. All the in-plant’s hard work seemed for naught.
But last year, in a reassuring turn of fortune, Unum decided to bring its forms management, production and fulfillment back in-house.
“There were some cost savings opportunities there,” explains Bob Wright, director of Unum’s Print and Distribution Services (P&D). Though Donnelley did a good job, he says, his operation had added a lot of digital equipment over the years as it combined Unum’s data center, copy center and publishing functions.
“With that big investment in equipment, you really had some capacity there that wasn’t being used,” he notes—especially since most printing was completed by 6 a.m., in time for the morning mail pickup. “What we are trying to do now is to capitalize on some of that excess capacity.”
The work coming back in-house includes forms and marketing materials. P&D either prints them on demand with its Xerox and IBM printers or fulfills orders from its warehouse.
“We showed the company about three quarters of a million dollars a year savings in insourcing that fulfillment work and POD work,” Wright remarks. “And those are some good dollars for us.”
Big Growth in Digital
P&D’s 50,000-square-foot plant—the same one used by Colonial Life back in 1994—has seen some significant changes since that first DocuTech arrived 14 years ago. With 73 employees on staff, it now runs two IBM 4100s, two DocuTech 180s, two Xerox DocuPrint 6180 MICR printers, and a Xerox Nuvera—not to mention its most recent addition: a Xerox iGen3.
The iGen3 was installed after one of P&D’s customers, an individual disability insurance unit, asked the in-plant to produce its enrollment materials in color. Since the shop already had a VIPP workflow in place to print those pieces on its DocuTech, it was not hard to convert to a color workflow for an iGen3.
Since then, a different business line has also converted its enrollment applications to color to run on the iGen3. Wright expects even more color business to come. He is also looking to add color to some of Unum’s transaction printing and possibly doing some transpromo printing in the future.
Other In-plants
While the Columbia facility is Unum’s largest in-plant, Wright also oversees two others in Chattanooga, Tenn. (22 employees), and Portland, Maine (18 employees). These operations use a variety of Xerox DocuTech, DocuColor and MICR printers, along with IBM duplex printers. The Columbia, Chattanooga and Portland facilities also use Bell + Howell Enduro and MailStar inserters and Gunther inserters.
Currently, Wright is overseeing the creation of an automated document factory, which will include a digital storefront, content management and variable data kitting capabilities. When completed, this Web-to-print system will receive files from a company document generation system, print them, add bar codes for tracking and integrity, and process them right through to inserting.
P&D uses address cleansing software to identify bad addresses before pieces are even printed. Mail is presorted by zip code to get a better rate. With 60,000 pieces of mail leaving the Columbia facility daily, the savings add up to more than $1 million a year.
Wright says volume trends for 2008 are up about 6 percent over last year—and 2007 figures were already impressive. Columbia’s operation produced 192,354,937 pages of marketing materials, policy booklets, letters, forms, statements and checks; Chattanooga printed 43,647,303; Portland output 12,113,854; and a small, two-person print operation in Worcester, Mass., part of the mail services area, contributed another 1,425,995 pages, for a grand total of 249,542,089 pages. Total mail pieces were about 23.6 million. Wright says P&D handles three times more work today than the Colonial Life in-plant did back in 1994.
As for Colonial Life, though it’s owned by Unum, it still exists, and P&D still prints its checks, bills, policies, statements and letters.
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.
