In-plant Profiles

Sometimes design is part of an in-plant's responsibilities and sometimes not. But for Valdosta State University's in-plant, providing customers with a little file design help is translating into more business and better turnaround times.

As the University of Alabama at Birmingham's in-plant prepares to relocate, IPG tours the plant they are soon to leave behind.

Ted Bailey’s dedication to printing began at an early age. During his high school years in Ontario, Calif., Bailey, now manager of printing and graphic services at Boise State University, worked for a commercial printer, along with his brother, doing miscellaneous bindery work. After taking some graphic arts classes, he was hooked.

in 2008, Yale University decided to begin construction of a new Yale School of Management. Yale Printing & Publishing Services was located in a building that was scheduled for demolition. To determine whether outsourcing made sense, the university did a complete financial review of the in-plant. The study revealed that it would be more costly to close the shop and outsource than to move it.

Student workers are a common sight at higher-ed in-plants, but it's rare to find one where 79 percent of the employees are students. That's the scenario at the Arizona State University Print & Imaging Lab.

Before adding a digital color press in 2010, Donna Cooper Horbelt says her in-plant at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth) was not nearly as busy as she wanted it to be. "I was losing color copy business to everybody in town," recalls the director of Auxiliary Enterprises, Printing and Media Services. "Our quality just wasn't good enough."

At University of Washington Creative Communications, the in-plant's implementation of Lean production practices have been critical to its rapid financial turnaround from a $200,000 deficit to a $300,000 profit—a half-a-million-dollar swing from one fiscal year to the next.

When she headed off to college in the early '80s, Lisa Hoover knew exactly where her studies would take her. "I wanted to be a TV news anchor," says Hoover, director of Bucknell University's Office of Publications, Print and Mail. "That's what I thought I was going to do. But I got sidetracked." That sidetrack has led to a rewarding graphic arts career and brought her to the director's chair at the nation's largest private liberal arts university, located in Lewisburg, Pa.

Harlequin set up an in-house digital paperback book printing line, staffed by seven people over two shifts, that enables the in-plant to print and finish more than 1,000 paperback books per hour. To print the books, Harlequin selected a high-volume Océ VarioStream continuous-feed printer, a toner-based solution that prints almost 10,000 books in an eight-hour shift.

When the Admissions department at Rochester Institute of Technology—the biggest customer of RIT's Print and Postal Hub—turned to Director John Meyer for help with increasing enrollment, he gave the project his full attention. Admissions had set a goal to increase enrollment by 10 percent a year for the next 10 years.