In-plant Profiles

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

The green movement isn’t just good for the environment; it can help your in-plant justify the equipment it needs. At the San Diego County Office of Education, the 18-employee in-plant had been getting by for quite some time with its aging imagesetter, vacuum frame and plate processor. But the chemicals involved in making plates were proving to be a nuisance, especially in an eco-minded state like California. So to wipe out the need for those chemicals and dodge the necessity of replacing that old equipment, the in-plant installed a Presstek TX-52 computer-to-plate system running chemistry-free Freedom plates. Not only has the shop saved

THE STATE of Ohio’s Printing and Mail Services operation had a lot going for it. Its facility on the west side of Columbus boasted a convenient loading dock, more than enough floor space and plenty of free parking. One thing it didn’t have, though, was easy access to customers, most of which were in downtown Columbus, a good 15 minutes away. “If you’re in the quick copy business, you really need to be around your customers,” acknowledges Joe Tucker, state printing administrator. “And being out here, logistically, wasn’t a good thing for us because everything we print, we ship downtown.” So when

THE QUESTION of whether or not to replace an aging offset press with a digital printer has nagged many in-plant managers. So when Millersville University hired a consultant last fall to analyze the five-employee Printing & Duplicating operation, it was no surprise when he recommended the shop decommission its sheetfed presses and go digital. What is a surprise is that, half a year later, this southeastern Pennsylvania in-plant just finished installing, not a NexPress, but a five-color, 19x26˝ Adast 755CP offset press. The decision to stick with offset—what’s more to upgrade from a two-color to a five-color press—was a complicated one, explains Barbara Buchanan,

As director of the Bureau of Publications for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania’s Department of General Services, Audrey Marrocco is both a devoted public servant and a dynamic publishing master. In her 22-year tenure with the Keystone State, Marrocco developed one of the government’s first Intranet sites, as well as its first Web-to-print application. She is currently seeking to centralize the majority of its printing and publishing services within a newly upgraded in-plant. Marrocco grew up near Harrisburg, the state capital. After high school, with no opportunity to attend college, she began her career in 1986 as an entry-level clerk typist for the Commonwealth. She

MANY IN-PLANT managers find their way into the graphic arts industry by accident. But for Robert Delgado, following in his father’s footsteps and running a print shop was always part of the plan. As Print Shop/Mailroom/Facility Manager for Western Growers, an Irvine, California-based agricultural association and insurance provider, Robert Delgado knows that pursuing a printing career was the right move. Working in his father’s shop as a teenager, he knew that graphic arts provided stability. “Printing seems to be pretty good whether the economy is slow or not,” he says. So even though he attended Golden West College, in Huntington Beach, Calif., as

When Auburn University’s CopyCat Digital Document Center launched a marketing campaign last year, the shop hoped the resulting visibility would bring in both new customers and new job orders. By all accounts, the Ultimate Tiger Tailgate campaign was a huge success. Not only did the program yield a list of 1,000 current and prospective customers interested in receiving future promotional material, and a profit of $7,000, it earned the Auburn, Ala., in-plant the IPMA In-House Promotional Excellence Award. “Our entire staff put forth a tremendous effort to pull this campaign off, and I can’t tell you what it means to me to

FOR THE second year in a row, ConocoPhillips Creative Services has won Best of Show in the In-Print contest. This time, however, the honor carries much more meaning for the 18-employee, Bartlesville, Okla.-based in-plant. “Last year’s project, it was all printed in-house, but the design was all handled by an outside agency,” notes Mike Cranor, senior printing specialist. The perfect binding was also done outside. This year, though, the winning magazine was done completely in-house, from the writing, photography and design, to the prepress, printing and binding. “So [being] able to bring it all in...that’s just real special to us,” says Cranor.