Who's Minding The Data?
In the 1990s and beyond, an in-plant is expected to do much more than simply print documents. Don't miss out on an opportunity to expand.
Five years ago, Tony Hinds' definition of an in-plant was probably very similar to that of most managers: an in-house printing facility.
Today, however, the number of managers clinging to that limited perception has dwindled, and Hinds—vice president of graphics and printing services at Prudential Securities, in New York—is definitely not among them. Instead, the buzz words are "document management," and most experts say you'll either embrace the concept or fall by the wayside.
"We're managing documents from concept to distribution now, not just printing them," says Hinds. "With the ongoing changes in technology and user awareness, unless you are technologically equipped to offer customers state-of-the-art resources you will not survive in this business."
Indeed, the word is out: in the 1990s and beyond, an in-plant is expected to do much more than simply print documents. After all, at their core, documents are merely data in need of assembly, formatting and maintenance. In the electronic age, that's all easily accomplished; as a result, in-plant managers are discovering that a host of new business opportunities fall right into their forte of managing data.
Hinds' shop at Prudential is a prime example. The graphics and printing services operation, with a $6 million annual budget and 47 employees, has evolved from purchasing its first DocuTech five years ago to establishing a sophisticated forms archive and retrieval system available to a customer base of 85,000 company employees around the world.
Documents are designed from scratch and either printed digitally, archived or both. DocuTech jobs are stored using Xerox extended storage, with graphics-rich documents retained on CD-ROMs or disk drives. Archived documents and generic forms are readily available to employees on the company's intranet Web site, meaning texts such as training and development manuals are now easily revised, reordered and reprinted.
"We put an intelligent, electronic form up there, they fill it out from the desktop and execute it on line," says Hinds. "They don't even have to print it out or fax it. If it's a document that has already been archived, the customer can just go in and update it to make minor changes. If they have major changes, we download it and send it back to the customer via the Internet."
It also gives in-plants a potential solution to the never-ending concern of any business: where to drum up additional orders. Archiving documents isn't only convenient—it virtually guarantees return business.
"You can definitely make money from archiving—we charge for storing documents—but more importantly, what it does for you is to secure your clientele base," says Hinds. "Once their document is archived, they've got to come back to you, so you've got them. It's very convenient for them to say they need job 444, revision number 8, and 50 of them—tomorrow."
Best of all, it's a solution that fits the fast-paced demands of many customers' needs.
"Most of the things we do now are repeat documents we've archived, and one of the things that's driving the archiving is the fact the customer can print on demand," says Hinds. "If the customer puts together a marketing campaign that he says is going to be an ongoing project, we will archive the document, and depending on the size of the document they can give us a week's notice or an hour's notice. Then we'll call it up and do everything from there."
Electronic Data Management
If Hinds' operation is not your father's in-plant, then Jim DelPrincipe's is not even your older brother's.
DelPrincipe, manager of graphic communication services at the New York State Department of Transportation, in Albany, has spent the better part of 11 years initiating a transformation even more dramatic than that of Prudential. The result: DOT remains the in-plant's host agency, but the successful operation now also serves a host of other government entities, such as New York's Office for Technology, Department of State, Division of State Police and SUNY (State University of New York) central administration.
"We're not just a little printing in-plant anymore, we're a graphic service," says DelPrincipe. "About 40 percent of our work is now electronic."
The in-plant electronically manages forms by maintaining a database history of orders and anticipating revision cycles. To expedite orders and distribution, DelPrincipe's operation relies on data management software networked to publishers in five locations around New York with "the Internet as our internal backbone." Everything is backed up using tape, CDs, zip drive user disks and Jaz drives.
"In the old days we performed document management with file folders, but now we're able to handle a lot more data and documents," DelPrincipe says. "One agency alone utilizes 650 forms, so we took those and analyzed the best way to print them, as well as the best way to manage the actual records of those forms for revisions and updates."
Everything was scanned and put into a database. Now, government employees throughout the state can order documents from their offices and specify a delivery location.
The electronics have also streamlined the in-plant itself. In the early '80s, DelPrincipe says, the in-plant had a staff of 102 focused on printing, microfilm and limited graphics. Today the staff totals only 48 people (including nine press operators) and handles printing, engineering reproductions, graphic arts, electronic composition, exhibit display, video, digital slides and electronic publishing.
"We're saving people an awful lot of time, and we're saving on waste from mistakes made by people who are not in the business of printing," he says. "We've eliminated shipping, stocking, pulling, and then repackaging and shipping, as well as the inventory—and that's only for one agency. Right now we do that service for five agencies, one of which has 1,300 forms and a third with 4,000 forms."
All of which adds up to a lot of business—especially important since DelPrincipe's shop is a profit-and-loss operation that survives only if the budget stays in the black. But the digital capabilities have led to new business opportunities, jobs that could not have been conceived only a few years ago.
One of the DOT in-plant's largest projects is an effort to scan 192,000 maps into a digital database, which will eventually enable a New York state real estate organization to destroy the film, mylar and linen originals.
With electronic files legally acceptable in New York, other such opportunities are in the pipeline. Most hinge on an organization's ability to provide a trail of evidence that proves an electronic file is original and unaltered. In this case, the state archives and records administration established the guidelines, and DelPrincipe's in-plant established the security of the "path" that the electronic document would take from scan to archive.
"There are a lot of ways to survive by managing a customer's records for them," DelPrincipe says. "You can charge them for storage, for a monthly fee, by revision or update, as well as by the number of copies you make and also the distribution. And you don't have to maintain a lot of negatives and plates; it's all digital, so you can go from digital to film or publishing.
"If all you do is printing, you don't survive."
Guiding Customers Through It All
You'll get no argument from Michael Pierick, director of document services at The Pennsylvania State University.
"Our mission is to create, reproduce, distribute and store documents in support of the teaching, research, and outreach functions at Penn State," Pierick says. "To do an effective job of document management you need to be involved in those four critical parts of the document process."
Which is what Pierick's shop at Penn State, operated on a cost-recovery basis, is doing. Course materials are routinely scanned and archived, as are a variety of other reports and documents. New and modified documents can be transmitted over the Internet. And of course, everything can be digitally printed on-demand through a network of DocuTechs.
"Document creation has been done on the prepress side for years," says Pierick. "But now we assist customers in personalizing documents, taking their data and merging it, doing the list verification process in our pre-mail services area so that as part of the document, we're creating a bar-coded address. On the reproduction side, the in-plant reproduction department needs to be at least working side-by-side if not located side-by-side with the distribution area. It really is silly to haul paper around any more than you have to. And for us, storing documents is also critical."
The in-plant is about to launch Penn State's first records center for just that purpose. It will start with a paper records center and add electronic storage later. This month Pierick's office will offer seminars on desktop publishing so customers can learn how to prepare an electronic document for reproduction and distribution on paper. The office routinely sets up document management presentations.
"Customers need flexibility in documents," Pierick notes. "The appropriate document for a customer has to do with how they are using it, so we need to help them plan, create, reproduce, distribute and store the best document for their purposes. The big advantage is, shepherding the document from start to finish gives us the best angle on supporting the customer throughout that whole process."
Connect And Query
Tony Hinds
tony_hinds@prusec.com
Michael Pierick
MQP4@obs.psu.edu
