UC-Riverside Printing, Reprographics and Mailing: A Valuable Asset

By Joe Ranoia

Improving Print-Mail Communication

Although mailing services came under the in-plant’s umbrella nearly 20 years ago, Dallas Johnson, director of Service Enterprises at the University of California-Riverside, admits that the communication between both sides hasn’t always been ideal.

“From a budgetary standpoint and integration standpoint I think we kept it way too separate,” he says. Then he observed the smooth operation at the in-plant of sister school UC-Berkley. That became Johnson’s model.

“Ultimately most everything we print gets mailed, some way, somehow,” he comments. So he has begun to cross-train the 25 print shop and 12 mailing employees. “Our mail guys are being exposed to the printing side and the printing guys exposed to mail,” he says.

The results have been positive so far.

“There was sort of joy on the mail side,” Johnson notes. “If things aren’t done right on the printing side, they have to pick up the pieces.”

For example, when jobs are not printed to U.S. Postal Service specifications, it can cost the university time and money to fix the issue.

“It’s sort of cost-avoidance,” Johnson says of the cross-training. “Our bulk mail specialist [Mickey Engstrom] has been spending a couple hours a week just talking and sharing info with our printing customer service people.”

“OUR PRIMARY focus really is color,” declares Dallas Johnson, from his office at the University of California-Riverside. “We’ve moved away from black and white. We saw that as sort of a dying market…still see it that way.” With 35 years of printing experience to guide him, Johnson thinks he has a pretty good idea where the industry is headed. So when the director of Service Enterprises decided to move his in-plant away from the “dying” monochrome market and into the more promising world of color printing, he did it in a big way.

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