While other in-plants downsize, Mayo Clinic’s Print Production & Mail Center has expanded drastically over the past two decades.

By Bob Neubauer

No Chargeback Brings Business Boom

Mayo Clinic’s Print Production & Mail Center has enjoyed tremendous growth over the past two decades and continued popularity among its customer base. Though the in-plant’s continuous improvement initiatives and staff enthusiasm have enabled the fast turnaround times customers crave, another reason they keep coming back is for the extremely reasonable prices.

The in-plant, in fact, does not charge back for printing, as long as customers order from its list of standardized products and materials. If they want special papers or sizes, the in-plant will send those jobs out, and the customer will pay full price. Some special services like laminating also incur a charge. But the in-plant reviews such jobs and advises customers how to modify them to fit the in-plant’s specifications, so they can save money.

“Not charging is pretty good for business,” remarks Senior Manager Jon Bedsted. “By doing all the standardizing we’ve done with products and materials, it makes us more cost effective.” The shop can buy materials in bulk and save Mayo money.

This policy does lead to a slight budget conundrum, he acknowledges: “The more work we do, the more money we believe we save—but to do more work, expenses go up,” he points out. At the same time, outside print procurement expenses have gone down, he points out, leading to an overall decrease in print expenses.

Bedsted tracks expenses closely and reports them to management, and he notes that overall his division, Media Support Services, has lowered its expenses.

“We believe knowing our costs is more important than charging our customers,” he says.

If you tracked Mayo Clinic’s Print Production & Mail Center over the past 20 years, you would notice one thing right away: it has expanded significantly. In an era when in-plants are shrinking in size with each retirement, Mayo’s shop has grown from a staff of 19 in 1994, when IPG first profiled the Rochester, Minnesota, in-plant, to an impressive 65 employees today, and a budget of $16,967,000. Over the past year alone, the in-plant grew 30 percent, after taking on the mail operation and adding 15 employees.

Since moving to a new facility two years ago, the in-plant now has 28,000 square feet of production space, plus a 35,000-square-foot warehouse for storing the volumes of patient education materials, health care books, forms, labels, periodicals, marketing materials and other items it prints for Mayo. The world-renowned nonprofit medical practice and medical research group was ranked the top overall hospital in the country by U.S. News & World Report in 2014-2015.

To produce all of Mayo’s booklets, brochures and postcards, as well as patient bills, invoices and forms, the in-plant employs three offset presses and seven digital presses. The two-shift operation outputs some 100 million impressions per year. Its wide-format area boasts four roll-fed inkjet printers and a UV-curable flatbed printer for printing scientific posters, banners, signage, window clings and more. The in-plant also handles CD/DVD and flash drive duplication. Its print buyers manage the purchase of about $12 million in outside printing each year.

The diverse backgrounds and leadership styles of the in-plant’s management team have helped the operation to thrive. From left: Rick Olsen, Bret Johnson, Kim Kelly, Jon Bedsted and Rebecca Thompson.

Diverse Management Team

The key to successfully managing such a thriving, busy operation, is having a strong, diverse team of supervisors who can think strategically and share ideas. This, says Senior Manager Jon Bedsted, is where his in-plant excels. He’s assembled a team of four production supervisors, each with different backgrounds and leadership styles, and together they have developed the in-plant’s vision and planned its direction.

“Having that diversity of thought and ideas, I think, helps us make better decisions,” says Bedsted, who has been with Mayo for 26 years. “We balance each other.”

The in-plant has used the DiSC personal assessment tool to understand the different personality styles of its staff so they can work better together. Bedsted says his management team is a blend of DiSC styles, which creates an ideal arena for sharing a diverse range of ideas.

Lyle Bartz checks color bars while operating the in-plant’s four-color sheetfed press.

“We have a really high trust level, so we’re able to have a conversation, have a debate, maybe even an argument about what we want to do,” he says. The result is a much better solution than could have been created by a single manager.

With his management team keeping production on schedule, Bedsted has been able to focus on strategy and process improvement. The shop is now in its fifth year of a continuous improvement initiative, which has shown remarkable results.

“That has been unbelievably successful,” Bedsted remarks.

The shop started with a 5S strategy (Sort, Set in Order, Shine, Standardize and Sustain), and employees eagerly bought into it, working hard to standardize processes and improve efficiency.

“It was a huge morale booster,” Bedsted says.

Mayo’s in-plant has seven digital presses. Here, Sherry Johnson loads paper into the Nuvera 288 black-and-white printer.

When the in-plant moved in 2013, continuous improvement played a big role in getting the new facility set up efficiently, with everything labeled and in its place, and a smooth workflow established. As a result, productivity in some areas has shot up 25 percent, Bedsted says. He’s proud of his staff’s efforts and of the fact that, every time he leads a tour of the plant, visitors comment on how clean it is and how engaged and passionate his employees are.

Mayo on a Roll

The in-plant’s growth, Bedsted notes, can also be traced to Mayo Clinic’s impressive growth over the past decade. Mayo now employs more than 32,000 people in Rochester, plus about 5,000 each in its Arizona and Florida locations. In addition, the Mayo Clinic Health System comprises more than 70 hospitals and clinics in Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin and Georgia, which employ another 16,000 people. In all, more than a million patients a year are seen at one of these facilities. That translates into a lot of printed material.

Since much of this material is private patient information, the in-plant maintains

a secure digital print room where it prints all of its variable data work (about four million pages per month).

“There’s only about 10 people that have access to that room,” remarks Bedsted. Being able to maintain the confidentiality of patient data is one of the in-plant’s most important functions, he feels.

Rick Irish refills envelopes on the mail inserter.

His operation also handles print buying for Mayo, and purchases about $12 million a year in outside printing. Seeing what is bring printed outside and how much it’s costing has helped the in-plant expand by giving Bedsted the data he needs to bring this work in-house.

“It really has helped us grow and acquire equipment,” he affirms. “We’ve been really well supported in getting the technologies that we believe we need.”

The in-plant recently replaced its CD/DVD duplicator, added a new wide-format printer and installed new banding machines. Next year the shop plans to replace its older envelope inserter.

Online Tools

Brian Hindal runs the UV flatbed printer, which can print on rigid materials like wood, metal and glass.

On the front end, the in-plant uses an online tool it developed years ago to give its customers access to PDFs of about 25,000 Mayo forms. They can download fillable PDFs or send them as print jobs to the in-plant. Another online tool called Virtual Ticket lets customers upload files to the print shop.

The in-plant’s e-prep area prepares and corrects all job files whether they are printed in-house or sent to outside printers.

“So not only do we save a lot of money by not having printers make alterations and corrections,” Bedsted points out, “we also develop ownership of all the files.”

Many of Mayo’s patient education materials are printed in large volumes as offset shells and then imprinted in smaller runs on digital presses and saddle stitched in-line. The in-plant also uses its small offset presses to print envelopes and long runs of forms.

The in-plant’s large-format output area produces numerous scientific posters for use in presentations, in addition to directional signage and banners for events. The shop’s 96˝ UV flatbed printer can print on rigid materials like wood, metal and glass. The in-plant has printed the colored glass used in some of Mayo’s hospital chapels. incoming USPS mail and packages, outgoing first class letters and flats—which are machine sorted by zip code—packages and “intra-Clinic” mail. The in-plant prints and inserts most outgoing first class letters and flats and processes some direct mail brochures and postcards for medical courses.

The department also has a photo printer, which it uses to print the photos of doctors and staff that are posted by hospital elevators, to create a more inviting environment for patients.

Bedsted is proud of the quality of his in-plant’s work and notes that, for the past decade, the shop has focused on color repeatability and standardization using GRACoL specifications. Monitors are calibrated regularly, he says. Whether a job is run on the Heidelberg press, the Xerox iGen4 or an Epson wide-format printer, he says, “they’ll look the same. That’s been a very valuable effort for us.”

Since taking on the mail center, the in-plant now handles incoming USPS mail and packages, outgoing first class letters and flats—which are machine sorted by zip code—packages and “intra-Clinic” mail. The in-plant prints and inserts most outgoing first class letters and flats and processes some direct mail brochures and postcards for medical courses.

Bedsted is currently involved in an organization-wide program to consolidate Mayo’s many forms and create a database. In the future he intends to focus on doing more printing for Mayo’s regional hospitals and clinics to keep the in-plant busy and save even more money for Mayo Clinic.

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Bob Neubauer Author's page

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.

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