In-plant Profiles

DUANE HUGHES has spent his entire career with a financial services company in St. Louis, but he’s had to “make change” recently due to shifts in employment and by his employer. Yet, despite a company transition that has altered the in-plant, Hughes has capitalized on his ability to balance people and production to keep himself and the print shop secure within the securities firm. Hughes has lived in Illinois, right across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, since he was about a year old. He received his Associate’s Degree in data processing from Lewis & Clark Community College, in Godfrey, Ill. In

IF YOU want to avoid talk of outsourcing by your parent company, get a few of your fellow departments on your side. Scott Thompson, supervisor of Printing Services for Brookdale Community College, in Lincroft, N.J., says that his in-plant works closely with the marketing department, which has led to strong support. “We have a great relationship with them,” he reports. “They’re giving us a lot of color work, so we now have a new wide-format color printer that prints 44? by up to 150 feet. The cost of the printer is less than half the cost of us sending the jobs outside, so

THE STATE of Washington’s King County Library System is reportedly the second busiest library in the nation. As the county continues to grow, the library system is being called upon to expand its collection and to provide more resources for its 43 community libraries. J. Tarner manages the five-employee graphics department in Issaquah, Wash., part of the public relations team for the library system. The team develops concepts, creates graphic design and manages print production for a range of promotional and program support materials. The group had been using a two-color A.B.Dick duplicator and Digital PlateMaster (DPM), as well as two Canon image

THE LEANDER (Texas) Independent School District has been growing continually for more than a decade, going from six campuses in the mid-1990s to 30 campuses for the current school year—and there’s still more to come. “We’re opening two elementary schools and a high school this summer,” says Jennifer Espinoza, the district’s manager of document production services. Volume has grown from 35 to 47 million impressions over the past three years. What’s even more amazing than the volume is the number of orders. “We don’t have lots of long jobs or packets that are constantly printing,” says Espinoza. “We take any order of

IN SOME people’s minds, “in-plant” equals “print shop.” Dan Adams, duplicating assistant at Chippewa Valley Technical College, in Eau Claire, Wis., views his job more broadly: To provide clients with whatever they want. “Five years ago we started taking on other responsibilities,” says Adams. The mail room was the first acquisition. The in-plant then took on commercial work, mostly from non-profits. The help desk for the IT department was outsourced, so Adams became first in line to repair the copiers. When the bookstore was outsourced, the in-plant started selling envelopes and other paper items. The shop now processes the student evaluations of

The State of Ohio Printing and Mail Services held a ribbon cutting ceremony last month to officially open its new 9,000-square-foot printing center. The new center is in the heart of downtown Columbus, near the majority of state agency customers. In addition to moving into this new facility, Ohio’s printing operation recently added two new Heidelberg Printmaster QM-46 presses, a Konica Minolta C6500 color imaging system, a Halm Super Jet Plus XL envelope press and two additional Canon imageRUNNER Pro 7110s. “We are making great strides in centralizing print production for Ohio’s government,” says Joe Tucker, state printing administrator, “and in doing so

SOMETIMES ACCIDENTS help you discover a new use for an old machine. Ron Lindgren, manager of Quality Impressions—the in-plant for Avada Hearing Care, in Beaver Dam, Wis.—says his in-plant once ended up with a half-million misprinted envelopes because the wrong original was chosen before printing. To fix the foul-up, the shop designed and printed custom labels, then used its Secap Jet 1 Tabber to position those labels and recover the envelopes. “Without that machine, 500,000 envelopes would have had to be trashed,” he reveals. That’s not to say the 18-month-old Jet 1 Tabber isn’t useful

TO AVOID problems with superstitious tenants and workers, most landlords skip past 13 when numbering the floors in their buildings. Not so with the offices of HCR ManorCare, a provider of short- and long-term skilled nursing and rehabilitation, headquartered in Toledo, Ohio. The two-employee Document Center is located on the 13th floor, where it shares space with the company’s data center. Both departments report to the manager of Production Services. The in-plant and data center have a unique arrangement. The in-plant uses the print room on the first shift to produce items like flyers, newsletters, postcards, HR materials, manuals and training materials, and then

WHILE ONLINE ordering introduces all kinds of efficiencies, some in-plants have trouble getting their customers to make the switch. That wasn’t the case at Allan Hancock College. Gordon Rivera, coordinator of Campus Graphics at the Santa Maria, Calif.-based community college, saw another school make the transition, so he and his team of three full-time employees—two of whom are designers—ran beta tests using EDU Business Solutions Print Shop Pro WebDesk. Then, he says, “We just set a date of February 29th as the last day that we would accept paper work orders. From what I’ve seen, we have complete buy-in.” Through Print Shop Pro,

PENNSYLVANIA WAS a whirlwind of activity this spring. Campaigning, rallies, forums, debates and other events all led up to the Democratic primary on April 22. Messiah College was right in the thick if it when it hosted the Compassion Forum on April 13 to discuss moral issues that bridge ideological divides within the country. The school’s 11-employee in-plant, College Press, spent 60 hours of overtime to take care of behind-the-scenes printing work leading up to the forum, which hosted presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. “We were very disappointed when Senator [John] McCain was unable to attend due to what his campaign