In-plant Profiles

Two years into a five-year lease, York Technical College Printing Services outgrew its Xerox DocuColor 12. Demand for color pages had skyrocketed to about 30,000 color prints per month. “Because of the slow, internal processor and only running at 12 copies per minute, the Doc12 ran all day and most nights after we left,” says Steve Mauney, Printing Services manager at the Rock Hill, S.C., college. So when the contract neared its end, the in-plant researched all brands and models of color printers in the 25-50 cpm range, using Xerox quality as a baseline. The department made a test CD and took its

JUSTIFYING NEW equipment on paper is one thing, but real-world verification is far more satisfying. For Jim Sebes that happened not long ago when a customer of the Cuyahoga County Central Services Printing and Reproduction (CSPR) Division asked for a quote on 50,000 single-color, one-sided documents, to be run on the in-plant’s two-color Sakurai press. A local copy shop also made a bid. The customer’s eyes nearly bulged at the result. “They couldn’t believe the price difference,” recalls Sebes, senior printing coordinator for the eight-employee in-plant. It was $1,400 cheaper to print the job on his in-plant’s offset press. This incident only underscored the

SITUATED ALONG the San Joaquin Delta waterway, about 80 miles east of San Francisco, San Joaquin Delta College has a student body of about 20,000 educated by more than 400 teachers. To help ensure students’ academic success, instructors provide assessments of each student’s progress just before final grades are assigned. The teacher identifies particular areas that need focus so students can gear their efforts accordingly. To produce a variable data piece such as this Academic Progress Letter, the college turns to its 12-employee Publication Center. “With our number of students and faculty, we probably do a half a million sheets of VDP a

THROUGHOUT MY years as editor of IPG, what I’ve enjoyed most has been meeting the managers who make up this industry. I’ve found them to be extremely approachable and accommodating, and I count many of them among my friends. One man I’ve run into at conferences a few times over the years is Wes Friesen, who oversees Portland General Electric’s in-plant. Our last meeting, at the TransPromo Summit in New York, inspired me to pursue a feature story about his printing operation. Imagine my surprise when I learned I wasn’t the only one impressed with his in-plant. NAPL has just announced

SERVING A major utilities company like Portland General Electric (PGE) can be a challenge, to say the least. After all, PGE provides power to over 1.5 million people in Oregon, covering 52 cities in a 4,000-square-mile radius. Its in-plant, Print and Mail Services, handles virtually all of PGE’s printing in its 7,000-square-foot facility. This includes customer billing and notices, mapping books for the line crews, training manuals, engineering/architectural drawings, presentations, self-mailers and more. This amounted to 35 million pages and 12 million mail pieces in 2007. Despite this monumental workload, the 13-employee in-plant has not only impressed PGE with its proficiency, it

The Xerox digital printers at Mt. San Antonio College have certainly gotten plenty of use over the years. “We just pretty much ran them into the ground,” reports Jim Carl, supervisor of printing. So the in-plant dug them up, traded them in and brought four new printers into its Walnut, Calif., shop: n A new Xerox DocuColor 5000 n Two Xerox DocuTech 135s, with FreeFlow digital workflow n A Xerox 4110 Since swapping its old Xerox 2060 for the 5000, Carl says, color printing at the four-employee in-plant has doubled. “We were averaging from 25,000 to 30,000 [monthly impressions] on the...2060,” he says. “But since we’ve got the 5000, we’ve

PATRICK O’DONNELL is a man who values tradition. Married to his wife, Patricia, for nearly 38 years, O’Donnell has been committed to the print industry even longer. “I took printing at our local high school and just fell in love with it,” the Dearborn, Mich., native recalls. “I’ve always lived in the metropolitan Detroit area, and I’ve never done anything else but the printing business.” Today, O’Donnell is the manager of Document Production Services for Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, for which he oversees three facilities—a main plant, with offset and digital printing capabilities, and two reproduction centers that

WHEN YOUR in-plant has 153 years of history behind it, promoting it as a cutting-edge marvel with a “customers first” mentality can be a tough job. Jean-Luc Devis thinks he’s found a way. Just 15 months into the job, the new director of the State of Washington Department of Printing has made it his mission to rebrand his 130-employee in-plant in the minds of customers. His message: “We’re not the state printer you used to know.” Instead of using the state mandate to force agencies to use the in-plant—the strategy just a few decades ago—the Department of Printing (PRT for short) now strives to

For years, Paul Lee played what he called a game of “Frogger” whenever he left his office on the first floor of an education building at Anne Arundel Community College, in Arnold, Md. “Getting from my office to the copy center I had to cross a hall,” says Lee, director of Document Services, “and if I did that between classes…” Frogger ensued—that classic video game where a frog tries to cross a busy street without being squashed. This danger aside, the in-plant’s location was less than ideal for another reason: it was in a different building than the mail center. So if jobs were finished late

IT IS a tale told over and over. An in-plant expands its technology, adapts to the times and survives. For Carmen Crist, however, the expansion of Printing Services at Michigan State University has not been a matter of survival. Rather, it has been entirely about serving the university in the best way possible. For Crist, director of both Printing Services and Administration and Planning at MSU, the role of his 17-employee in-plant has evolved from printing words on paper to any form of communication that benefits the university—even if it means less profit for his department. “Measuring success only by a bottom