Business Management - In-plant Justification

THE IN-PLANT industry, like many other industries, has been knocked off balance by the economic turmoil of the past several years. As companies have been forced to cut costs, print has been identified as an area of potential cost savings. Gone are the days of 500-page, end-of-year reports and formal printed presentations. These major drivers of print volume have been replaced by documents housed on SharePoint sites and PowerPoint decks to be presented digitally. And now that companies have made this behavioral change, they are unlikely to change back.

When SUPDMC attendees weren't networking or attending sessions, they were visiting Vanderbilt University's impressive in-plant.

ANY TIME in-plant managers get together, the conversation and camaraderie never end. This was particularly true at the recent Southeastern University Printing and Digital Managers Conference (SUPDMC). About 30 in-plant managers from universities all over the southern U.S. and as far away as the state of Washington got together in Nashville, Tenn., to exchange information and listen to presentations to help them tune up their operations.

Never assume, just because your in-plant has been around for ages, that everyone knows about it. Employees come and go, and some of the new ones may never have dealt with an in-plant before, and thus have their own ideas about how print jobs should be handled.

Hundreds of in-plant managers attended Graph Expo 2011. In-plant Graphics assembled about 50 of them into a room for an informal roundtable luncheon.

THIS IS an argument for unfair competition. In the end, it will conclude that service departments and auxiliary enterprises (SDAEs) should have an unfair advantage. It will suggest that institutional customers (i.e., departments) should be made to do business with the SDAEs and should be asked to pay a higher-than-market price for the related products or services.

Two years ago, things were looking up for M.I.T. Copy Technology Centers, the in-plant at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge. After a long search, the 21-employee operation had finally made the decision to acquire a Xerox iGen3 and was preparing to enter the world of high-quality color printing.

You need to update your equipment, but your financial circumstances say, "There are no funds available." So how do you buy what you need, so you can continue to improve your operating performance, when there's no cash, and no budget approved for needed equipment?

Why is it that sometimes in-plant printers can’t catch a break—at least, not from commercial printers? It seems like every time I talk to a commercial printer and the subjects of in-plants comes up, all I hear is negativity.

In-plants at non-profits play an especially crucial role for their organizations: they reduce the cost of printing, allowing the non-profit to put those savings to use to fulfill its mission. Our recent survey of in-plants at non-profit organizations brought in 37 responses.