In-plant Profiles

To improve the quality of its brochures, booklets, post cards and color statements, the 23-employee printing and mailing operation at Western & Southern Financial Group recently became one of the first in-plants to install the new Xerox iGen4 digital press. Dan Cowan, Print/Volume Document Production Manager, feels the quality of the iGen4’s output is even better than that of the iGen3. “It’s much closer to offset,” he contends.

A lot has changed over the past couple years at the American Academy of Family Physicians' Digital Printing department.

“We thought our numbers were way down from previous years because it didn’t seem like we were working very hard,” says Supervisor Shawn Parkison. “But, once the numbers were in, we discovered we had actually done the same amount of work as last year. The difference is that we’re so much more efficient.”

Dale Zipkin knew his shop needed a better color printer. The 10-employee in-plant for the New York State United Teachers (NYSUT) union was using older color devices from Canon and Konica Minolta, but maintenance problems were hindering productivity. Splitting jobs between the two printers wasn't working out either.

Visitors trying to find their way around New York’s vast Metropolitan Museum of Art (MET) usually end up consulting one of the floor plans available at the admission desks. Unfortunately for the MET’s in-plant, tucked away behind the gift shop, that job had long been out of reach. “We just could not do the job economically on our two-color Komori,” says Richard Peterson, manager of Office Services for the 139-year-old museum. That all changed recently when the 11-employee Printing Services department added a new four-color Ryobi 784 EP perfecting press. Now able to print two-over-two on a larger sheet size, the in-plant has brought those floor plans in-house and is slowly adding other work that previously had to be outsourced.

PRESIDENT DWIGHT D. Eisenhower had a dream of developing a program that would promote international understanding and friendship. So in 1956, Eisenhower founded People to People, basing the organization on his idea that direct contact between ordinary citizens from different parts of the world can encourage cultural understanding and world peace. Eight U.S. Presidents have served as the honorary chairman of People to People International.

AS JASON James Seto sees it, he was born to be a craftsman.  Following in a long line of family members that have learned a trade, Seto chose printing as his profession at an early age. He now serves as the administrator at the in-plant for the Hawaii State Department of Education (HDE) in Honolulu, and holds the title of Reprographics Specialist III.

You read about the New York City Department of Health’s in-plant in our April issue. Now you can see it for yourself in a new video.

IPG Editor Bob Neubauer visited this growing in-plant recently and documented his trip on video (crazy cab rides and all). He and the shop's managers traveled from Manhattan to Brooklyn to tour all three of the shop's locations and see some of the latest high-tech equipment the in-plant has installed.

Folsom Lake College knows the value of having an in-plant. That’s why the Sacramento-area school created a new in-plant a few years back and spent thousands of dollars stocking it with the latest equipment. Now, fortified with Konica Minolta printers, a Heidelberg press and an assortment of bindery equipment, the two-employee in-plant has just unveiled its latest addition: an online job ordering system.

“OUR PRIMARY focus really is color,” declares Dallas Johnson, from his office at the University of California-Riverside. “We’ve moved away from black and white. We saw that as sort of a dying market…still see it that way.” With 35 years of printing experience to guide him, Johnson thinks he has a pretty good idea where the industry is headed. So when the director of Service Enterprises decided to move his in-plant away from the “dying” monochrome market and into the more promising world of color printing, he did it in a big way.

Michigan State University is “very picky” about quality and registration, says Dennis Seybert, manager of Print and Digital Communications. So when the in-plant’s Konica Minolta bizhub PRO C500 left the shop a little unimpressed, it decided to upgrade. In January, the East Lansing, Mich.-based in-plant swapped the C500 for a new bizhub PRO 6501 color printer.