In-plant Profiles

FOR ALVIN Griffin, director of Graphic Production for North Carolina’s Charlotte-Mecklenburg School District, and proud owner of a new Xerox iGen3 digital press, a K-12 in-plant stays in the good graces of the superintendent for one primary reason. “We’re dedicated to their needs,” he says. “We provide the support documents for the teachers and the administration. We provide documents used by the students. Ultimately, our goals are aligned with the goals of everyone else in the organization: Education.” Keeping aligned with the goals of the organization became especially important with the arrival of a new superintendent, Peter Gorman. After 100 days at the helm

DAN STRODTMAN was 12 years old and living in Joliet, Ill., during the late ’60s when he began helping the next door neighbor, who ran a part-time printing business out of his garage. Fascinated with the old letterpress and other tools of the trade, Strodtman learned the California job case—a drawer with compartments that held lead type for letterpress printing—and soon was assisting with setting up and running business cards and forms. “From that time on, I have always been a printer,” says Strodtman, director of Printing Services at Valley View School District, in Romeoville, Ill. Graphic arts courses in high school

Steve Goodman, director of Campus Services at the University of Illinois at Springfield, has died of cancer. He was 58. Well known among attendees of the Association of College and University Printers (ACUP) conference, Mr. Goodman took the UIS position in April 2001 after spending 15 years as manager of print and mail services at California State University in Fresno. When asked, in a 2001 interview, why he chose to stay in the in-plant industry rather than move to the commercial sector, he remarked, “The in-plant allows you to actively work with an organization and help an organization grow.” And that’s exactly what he strived to

When University of Alaska-Fairbanks Printing Services added its new Agfa :Acento II E thermal computer-to-plate device in the fall, it arranged to keep its Agfa SelectSet 7000 imagesetter around for three months, just in case the transition from film to CTP didn’t go well. “We never turned it on again once we had that platesetter installed,” reports Warren Fraser, manager of Printing Services. Nor has the in-plant looked back fondly even once on the film world it left behind. For one thing, the new platesetter has reduced dot gain and improved quality: “It’s rare that a plate gets rejected,” Fraser testifies. “It’s been really good.” For

As a research and marketing firm for life insurance and financial organizations, LIMRA International hosts quite a few conferences—more than 20 a year. When it needs conference brochures and programs, the Windsor, Conn.-based company naturally turns to its in-plant. But printing isn’t this in-plant’s only skill. Called Business Services, the 13-employee operation also provides multimedia services: photography, video recording/editing, PowerPoint support and CD/DVD creation. So for each of LIMRA’s conferences, the in-plant may check speakers’ PowerPoints and fix problems, put those presentations on CD, videotape the sessions, edit them, add music, burn them onto DVDs, print labels and accompanying brochures and mail them. When

The U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) has implemented Avanti’s Print MIS software to manage its Washington, D.C.-based printing operation.  “Avanti has a great deal of expertise in helping government print facilities streamline their workflow and provide added value to their customers,” says Patrick Bolan, president and CEO of Avanti Computer Systems. “We are excited to be involved in helping the GPO take their operation to the next level.”  The U.S. Government Printing Office is the Federal Government’s primary centralized resource for gathering, cataloging, producing, providing, authenticating, and preserving published U.S. Government information in all its forms. GPO is responsible for the production and distribution of hundreds

SAN DIEGO State University is an academically rich, urban university with more than 34,000 students, award-winning professors, top-notch research facilities and a location that serves as the gateway to Latin America. Like most universities—especially in California—SDSU is also very conscious of its environmental footprint and constantly monitors and works to reduce its impact on the environment. In April of 2005, the university hired Leslie Rutledge to transform its in-plant, ReproGraphic Services. Her years of employment with commercial printers and graphic arts vendors made her the right person for the challenge. “When I walked in the door on April 4, 2005, which is one

SOMETIMES IT seems I’m chained to this desk, “observing” the industry through e-mails and Web sites. So I like to break away now and then to see for myself what’s happening in the world’s in-plants. Recently I caught a train up to New York to do just that. On a frigid winter day I walked through a sea of scarves and hats to the United Nations’ headquarters to visit one of the largest in-plants out there. Paul Kazarov, chief of the Publishing Section, took me for a walk through the U.N.’s vast underground in-plant, filled with just about every type of printing and binding

AS MANAGER of UCSD Imprints, the 14-employee in-plant for the University of California-San Diego, Larry Fox has spent the past 12 years expanding and digitizing his operation to better serve the university’s 21,000 students and 20,000 faculty and staff. The university has taken notice. For the past five years, the in-plant has been awarded the Business Affairs Customer Satisfaction award for its copier management and printing services. Born and raised in eastern Colorado, Fox attended Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Okla. He earned a degree in Theology with a Biblical Studies major and a minor in German. After college, he spent a

FEW IN-PLANTS have embraced on-demand printing like ASG Central Operations, in Naples, Fla. That’s because, unlike most in-plants—dragged into print-on-demand from the traditional long-run world—ASG Central Operations was created as a 100 percent digital, on-demand operation by its parent, ASG Software Solutions. In its eight and a half years of existence, Central Operations has produced, packaged and shipped countless technical documents for ASG’s 150+ software products, as well as marketing and training collateral for the company’s 900 employees in 65 offices around the world. To handle all this volume, the in-plant utilizes nine employees in four facilities, located on both coasts and in