In-plant Profiles

The in-plant at Our Daily Bread Ministries, a non-profit, global ministry, recently went live with Avanti Slingshot print MIS.

When Kandy House first enrolled in her vocational technical high school’s business program, studying graphic arts wasn’t anywhere on her radar. In fact, she says she didn’t even know exactly what the graphic arts were.

Formally established in 1863, the Seventh-day Adventist Church has, over the past century and a half, grown from a devoted offshoot of 19th-century revivalism into a global presence. Even as early as the 1840s, the small group of faithful that would become the church relied on the printed word to interconnect the community. It began…

If you peek beneath the feathers and webbed feet of the iconic Aflac Duck advertising character, you will find an in-house inkjet printing powerhouse that produces a heavy print workload for insurance industry giant Aflac’s wide customer base.

When the Pinnacol Print Shop installed a new Xerox Color 1000 in November, it was intended to produce invoices and statements for the Denver-based worker’s compensation provider. But the in-plant quickly learned that its new digital color press would allow it to produce Pinnacol Assurance’s collateral materials in-house as well—work that was previously being outsourced.

In June of 2014, 16 employees of Print, Mail, Copy (PMC) Solutions at the University of Arkansas were called into a conference room. Each one received a letter explaining that in two years, offset printing, which had been losing money, would be phased out of the in-plant and they would not be part of the plan moving forward.

“Just being in the room when decisions are being made, a lot of times, is the biggest challenge” for in-plants, declares Chuck Werninger, director of Administrative Services at the Houston Independent School District (HISD). “A lot of shops are deleted from the plan before they ever hear about the plan.”

Most in-plants’ print jobs center around the core business of their parent companies. But, on any given day, Brian Kniceley’s shop on the shores of Lake Erie could be producing a range of items including window décor for a donut shop, props for a magic show, vehicle decals, or informational signage about the Tyrannosaurus Rex.

For many in-plants, short-run digital printing is the key to their future growth. Not so at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston.

Though just signed into law in December 2014, GPO's name change from Government Printing Office to Government Publishing Office has been "a long time coming," says John Crawford.