In-plant Profiles

AS A CHILD, Mark Shaw dreamed of flying to the stars.  And though his current role as operations specialist for National Security Technologies, LLC (NSTec) isn’t exactly the same as being an astronaut, it’s still his dream job. “It’s fascinating,” he enthuses. “It motivates me. The brilliance of the scientists there, it’s amazing.”

CHERYL BUXTON is pretty up-front about the fact that some of the equipment in her Topeka, Kan., in-plant is older than the employees who run it. In June, the director of the Division of Printing and Surplus Property for the state of Kansas replaced a 30-year-old stitcher with a state-of-the-art Muller Martini Bravo-Plus saddle stitcher with AMRYS (automatic makeready system).

Tapped to oversee an in-plant located in a college football stadium (really), Tom Tozier needed a new game plan. “When I came here [in January 2008], not only was the shop not CTP, we were farming out to a film setter. We actually bought our film from a print shop in town,” admits Tozier, director of Imaging Services at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

It was one of the most important printing jobs of the year...yet it was being printed off campus. That bothered the provost at Longwood University, in rural Farmville, Va. He began asking why the school was paying an outside vendor to print its diplomas instead of sending them to its five-employee in-plant. When word reached Tim Trent, director of Printing Services, he just smiled. His shop was three weeks away from installing a new Xerox 700 digital color press, a device he knew would be more than capable of printing diplomas. Trent invited the provost to visit in a few weeks.

As the demand for four-color work increased at Madison Gas and Electric’s in-plant, so did the Wisconsin shop’s need to upgrade its platemaking process. “We had two-color Ryobis, but about 80 percent of our work was four color,” reports Graphics Services Supervisor Chris Hrubes. He targeted chemistry-free CTP as the ideal solution for the facility’s workload requirements and environmental standards.

Steve Schmuger, graphic services manager for Miami-Dade County’s General Services Administration, can summarize one of his most important job responsibilities into three words: feeding the organism. Schmuger envisions the shop’s workflow as a dynamic, vital entity. “It can do more and more things for you, but you must keep feeding it—that is, investing in technology and adding more components,” he asserts.

IT STARTED in the parking lot. As he stepped out of his car one day, Greg Cooper, print shop manager for the city of Baltimore's Digital Document Division, happened to run into the city's IT director. They started talking about the checks and bills that IT was printing for the city on its Xerox 92C printers. Cooper told him, flat out, that his in-plant was better positioned to handle this work than IT, whose main focus was supposed to be computers and data.

Providing services of any kind to the Houston Independent School District means thinking big—there's simply no other way to approach the task. Educating more than 220,000 students in a 301-square-mile network of elementary, middle and high schools, HISD is the seventh-largest public school system in the nation and the largest in Texas. With an annual budget in excess of $1.6 billion and a work force of more than 28,000 full- and part-time employees, HISD is a producer and a consumer of services on a truly Texas-sized scale.

Tucked inside a nondescript brick building at the edge of campus, the University of Delaware’s Graphic Communications Center has brought a lot of favorable attention to the university in recent years. The quality of its offset printing has earned the in-plant numerous awards, including two Best of Show honors in the In-Print contest. Now the 19-employee in-plant is bringing the Fighting Blue Hens into the spotlight once again by becoming one of the first in-plants to install a new Xerox iGen4 digital color press. 

RIGHT NOW, somewhere in the world, a teacher is admonishing students: "Don't copy!" But within the Bethel School District, in Spanaway, Wash., educators and staff are applauding Diane Karl for nearly 26 years of consistent, finely executed copying (and printing). As the district's print shop manager, Karl oversees graphic design, production, reproduction and print distribution services for 17 elementary schools, six junior high schools, three high schools, an alternative school for grades eight through 12, an online academy and district administration.