With four facilities spanning the country, and another on the way in the U.K., ASG Central Operations is providing crucial on-demand printing services for its company.

By Bob Neubauer

Scanning: A Crucial Service

Soon after he started as director of ASG Central Operations in 1999, Craig Bamberg pushed for the software company to start scanning its paper files into a digital format. After all, the Naples, Fla.-based company was in prime hurricane territory, and those files could end up scattered across the state. Not only that, renting storage space along the posh Gulf Coast was not exactly a bargain.

So in 2001 the in-plant started offering scanning as a new service—one that was crucial to the company’s bottom line.

“We take file cabinets and turn them into digital files,” Bamberg quips. “It took us a year and a half to scan a little over 10,000 customer files.” Each file contained an average of 100 images, he adds.

When ASG purchased DSSI Software last summer, Bamberg started a scanning operation there in Morgan Hill, Calif. Duplicating was added, and this became a fourth unit of Central Operations.

To carry out the scanning, the in-plant uses its Xerox 4110 CP and a Panasonic KV-S2055 scanner.

“I think it’s a phenomenal service,” says Bamberg, who urges all in-plants to start offering it. Just be prepared to encounter resistance, he says, because you’ll be changing basic business practices. Start with areas you are in charge of, he suggests, and use the results to show other departments how well it works.

“When you try to do it just from a conceptual basis, it’s a very difficult road to change a business process like that,” he says. “It almost has to be a show and tell.”

FEW IN-PLANTS have embraced on-demand printing like ASG Central Operations, in Naples, Fla. That’s because, unlike most in-plants—dragged into print-on-demand from the traditional long-run world—ASG Central Operations was created as a 100 percent digital, on-demand operation by its parent, ASG Software Solutions.

In its eight and a half years of existence, Central Operations has produced, packaged and shipped countless technical documents for ASG’s 150+ software products, as well as marketing and training collateral for the company’s 900 employees in 65 offices around the world.

To handle all this volume, the in-plant utilizes nine employees in four facilities, located on both coasts and in between. The operation has become adept at receiving jobs digitally through its online ordering portal and distributing them between its four facilities.

The man overseeing all this is Craig Bamberg, director of Central Operations. When print requests come in from around the world via the in-plant’s Business Information Portal (BIP), Bamberg decides which facility can best handle them, based on their capabilities and current workload. Because the in-plant operates in three time zones, he may send a late-in-the-day arrival out west. Large jobs can be split between facilities.

“It really gave me the freedom to assign where I had to assign,” he says of BIP.

Bamberg says digital on-demand printing is very important to ASG, a provider of professional services and software for the management of applications, operations, security and more. Because the in-plant produces the manuals that go with that software, it is a crucial part of the company’s business, he notes.

“We’re fulfilling a product need,” he says.

His operation performs a final quality check on the materials it prints, makes sure the software matches the manuals, and then packages and ships the software.

The Four Facilities

Central Operations breaks down like this:

• Naples, Fla. The flagship operation has a staff of five, including Bamberg, and recently moved into a new facility. It specializes in printing four-color marketing material and black-and-white technical documents, as well as printing for ASG’s executive offices.

• Reston, Va. With two employees, this operation handles global black-and-white technical documentation and four-color marketing jobs for Europe.

• Phoenix. This one-person operation specializes in printing black-and-white training documents. It handles color work when other operations are busy, as well as individual direct marketing fulfillment.

• Morgan Hill, Calif. The newest facility has one employee to handle high-volume scanning and small duplicating jobs.

In addition, ASG plans to open another facility outside of London due to high demand for printing in Europe. It will handle black-and-white and color printing, plus shipping and scanning.

“We’re very excited about expansion into Great Britain,” Bamberg enthuses.

On Demand Experts

Though he came from a commercial printing background, Bamberg has clearly become an advocate of print on demand.

“Nothing is out of date,” he says, referring to company documents. “The minute it changes, you’re going to get that version of it immediately.” And ASG’s documentation changes constantly, he says, as products are upgraded. The old model of printing in bulk and warehousing would be impractical.

To handle all this digital printing, Central Operations uses an array of Xerox equipment, ranging from DocuTech 65s to a DocuColor 6060. It has cutting, folding and stitching equipment as well as high-volume scanners. Plus, Bamberg oversees a fleet of more than 50 Xerox multifunction printers around the globe.

Coming soon to the in-plant, Bamberg says, is a six-color Xerox 8160 wide-format printer to handle trade show graphics.

An enthusiastic promoter of ASG Central Operations’ accomplishments, Bamberg’s efforts have even drawn the attention of Xerox CEO Anne Mulcahy, who met with him while in Florida to learn more about his in-plant.

“She wanted to know what we’re doing with our equipment,” he explains. Xerox likes the fact that his operation uses all of its equipment’s capabilities, he says.

“We push over 85 percent of those buttons,” Bamberg notes. “No sooner do we get that equipment in here but we’ve already figured out a way to do a mail merge off of the base software. We’re always pushing it right to the max.”

Upper Management Support

ASG’s upper management knows this, he says, and trusts the in-plant to make the right equipment choices. Because of this support, Bamberg has been able to get new equipment when he feels it’s needed. Recent upgrades include a Xerox 4110 with folding and stitching and a Xerox 6060 with a high-capacity stacker.

To further cement the shop’s good approval rating from management, Bamberg compares his costs with outside printers and submits reports.

Because ASG’s marketing department is also based in Naples, Bamberg has close ties with the designers there, which has proven beneficial.

“They include me from day one. They ask what our capacities are and design toward those capacities,” he says.

The opening of the UK print facility is not the only thing Central Operations has in store in the coming months. The in-plant has upgraded to PrintShop Mail software so it can print variable images. This will allow it to produce post cards with different product photos. And beyond that?

“I’d like to see us get into more of the disc burning,” Bamberg says. “I think its a direction we need to go.” IPG

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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.

Embody­ing Print On Demand

Embodying Print On Demand