In-plant Profiles

IT’S A good thing Catherine Chambers isn’t afraid of a challenge, because that’s exactly what she got when she accepted the position of manager of Printing & Mailing Services for the State College Area School District in State College, Pa. “I replaced an excellent manager [Gary Burris] who’d been in the position for 38 years,” she explains. “It was my job to take an analog print shop, complete with three offset presses, and bring it into the digital age.” And with more than 20 years of experience in managing print, copier and mailing functions in higher education and the private sector, Chambers was

IT HAD been a test of perseverance, and Otis Johnson had finally won. Three years ago, the manager of Printing and Graphic Services at the University of Texas Medical Branch put in a proposal for a direct imaging offset press. He had analyzed the amount of short-run, four-color work his in-plant was producing on two-color Heidelbergs and decided a DI press would be the perfect solution. But before his proposal could be approved, the university president retired. The interim administration would not act on it, so Johnson waited patiently. When the new president came on board, Johnson tried again. This time he got

University of North Texas Printing/Eagle Images has completed a major move that consolidated its front office, prepress and production copy areas. For years, the 33-employee in-plant’s copy operation was in a separate building. This distance often inhibited communication between staff members. “It was kind of like a team divided,” remarks Director Jimmy Friend. “Now you have everybody in the dugout with you.” The in-plant’s front office moved to a different location within the University Services Building in June. The prepress department—including the in-plant’s two HP Indigo digital presses—relocated in early July. At the end of that month, the copy operation moved into the

UNIVERSITY OF California-Berkeley Printing Services has long been known as one of the leading offset printers in the in-plant industry. When IPG visited and wrote about the in-plant back in the fall of 1996, it had just spent $3 million on a six-color, 40? Heidelberg Speedmaster 102, a move that put it on par with most of the Bay Area’s mid-sized commercial printers. With 174 employees and $15 million in annual revenue, the shop ran three shifts a day back then and handled 65 percent of UC-Berkeley’s printing needs. But eight years later, the state’s budget in disarray, the in-plant was losing business

IF YOU look back at some of the large in-plants IPG profiled in the ’90s, you’ll quickly observe that nearly all of them have gotten smaller in the intervening years. And busier. Such is the case with one of the largest of them all: the California Office of State Publishing (OSP). When IPG ran a cover story on the colossal Sacramento printer in July of 1995, it had 540 employees. Today it employs 326. Yet revenues have gone from $56 million back then to $65 million today. State Printer Geoff Brandt says the staff shrinkage started around 1998 when the state lifted

YOU MIGHT remember hearing something about the ballots used in Florida for the 2000 election. For one Miami in-plant, that controversy started a chain of events that led to the recent acquisition of a new four-color press. “After we had hanging chads, we went to electronic voting,” explains Steve Schmuger, graphic services manager for the Miami-Dade County General Services Administration. “There was a great deal of dissatisfaction with the touch-screen voting.” In fact, the state ordered counties to cast aside their touch-screen machines and return to paper ballots, to be read by optical scanners. Suddenly, this 21-employee in-plant had to produce several million

When IPG wrote about Colonial Life & Accident Insurance Co. in May of 1994, its in-plant was in the midst of a major forms management initiative. The Columbia, S.C., shop was moving its forms printing from offset presses to a new Xerox DocuTech and had come up with a groundbreaking solution where forms were stored as PostScript files on a server and printed on demand. Upper management was excited about the new DocuTech. The in-plant was looking forward to reducing warehouse inventory. All signs pointed to a successful future for the in-plant. Then came some unexpected curve balls. First, Colonial Life was

FOR DOUG Fenske, printing was never a thought in his mind when he was growing up in Madelia, Minn. Then in 1974, between his freshman and sophomore years at Gustavus Adolphus College, he took a summer job at House of Print, a newspaper printer that also did commercial work. “I fell in love and have been in printing ever since,” reflects Fenske, now director of printing at nearby Minnesota State University, Mankato. At House of Print, owned by Ogden Newspapers, Fenske was a camera assistant, shooting film and then stripping and making plates. After a couple of years, he

LOUISIANA STATE University Graphic Services has long been ranked as one of the top university in-plants. When IPG profiled the Baton Rouge operation back in March 1998, it boasted a $7.6 million budget and 98 employees. By 2004, sales had grown to $9.1 million. But then Hurricane Katrina hit, and life hasn’t been the same since. “It significantly cut state budgets mid-year,” recalls Tony Lombardo, who was recently appointed director of Auxiliary Services, which includes the in-plant. “It threw all of the departments into panic mode. You had to get real ‘creative’ in how you made it to the end of the

A MERGER that results in the creation of a dynamic financial institution and can boast two in-plant printing sites is a great success story that ends with a thud. I don’t recommend trying to build better in-plants through subtraction and I take comfort in the fact that none of my staff was harmed in the production of this story. Defying Gravity “They are going to close you.” my wife said, as I left for work, “I don’t know why you bother to keep taking meetings.” I didn’t answer. I couldn’t allow myself to be that pragmatic. I did what I always did when