Business Management - Marketing/Sales

Winning 13 In-Print 2010 awards—plus the Best of Show—was a tremendous honor for the Printing Services staff at the University of Oklahoma. To show its gratitude to the customers that ordered those award-winning pieces, the in-plant recently held an awards presentation, during which it presented those customers with duplicate In-Print awards.

The 2010 In-Plant Printing and Mailing Association (IPMA) conference brought close to 100 in-plant managers to New Mexico's largest city. The topics, speakers and enthusiasm were almost as hot as the weather.

I WAS very excited last year when I learned the 2010 In-Plant Printing and Mailing Association (IPMA) conference would be held in one of my all-time favorite places, Albuquerque, NM. Over the years, several family members have moved there, and I've visited more than a dozen times, so going there last month for the conference was like a homecoming—in more ways than one.

The University of Texas at Austin Document Solutions was honored with IPMA’s In-House Promotional Excellence Award for its self-promotion efforts.

A few months ago, Tony Seaman was in charge of a 14-employee in-plant at the University of Mississippi. Today he is director of Brand Creative Services, a 25-employee operation that includes not just printing but designers, copywriters and brand account managers.

IT WAS a reunion well worth waiting for. Two years after its last conference in Florida, the Association of College and University Printers (ACUP) finally met again in April in Charlotte, N.C., bringing old friends and newcomers together for an enjoyable and enlightening event.

Do we really understand what the customer experience is like? And why that experience might drive customers to look for alternative sources for printing?

LOCATED ABOUT four miles from the state capitol building in Santa Fe, N.M., the state's Printing & Graphic Services operation has been serving New Mexico for a quarter century. For most of that time, the shop has focused on black-and-white reproduction of business cards, letterhead and forms. High-quality color work, however, was eluding it, and as the demand for this work increased, the in-plant found itself losing business.

WHAT WOULD you say if you learned you could earn a 40 percent margin on a product you wouldn't have to manufacture or inventory? And what if we told you that this product would be desirable to the customers who are already purchasing your printed products?

There is nothing wrong with failure if you learn something from it—especially if you use what you learned to fix a problem.

I had an experience several years ago that illustrates this point. It was a Saturday, and one of our press operators was running the program for an event at our performing arts facility. The pressman noticed a mistake—a photo had an incorrect caption, as I recall—so he shut down the press. And he went home, but that’s another story.