In-plant Profiles

A new five-color press is just the beginning for Spartan Stores, which plans to expand its in-plant even more. Wander through any grocery store and you are likely to see thousands of dollars worth of printing. Posters line the windows, inviting shoppers to come inside; stacks of circulars greet them as they walk through the automatic doors; and multi-color shelf cards point out sale items. Then there are the endless ad inserts in the Sunday paper. Who designs and prints up all this material? For a group of grocery retailers in the Midwest, it's the in-plant print shop at Spartan Stores. Forget

When a tornado virtually leveled his campus, Brad Johnson turned to a fellow in-plant manager to help him print his college's documents. When the tornado hit, it hit hard. Like a chainsaw, it tore through the once-serene campus of Gustavus Adolphus College, tearing up trees, smashing buildings and inflicting some $68 million in damage on the St. Peter, Minn.-based school. When Brad Johnson got a look at the wreckage the next morning, he couldn't believe his eyes. "I was in shock," recalls the director of printing services. "I've never seen anything like it. It was one of the hardest moments of my life."

Montgomery County Public School's in-plant explains why going the digital route enabled more customer satisfaction—and created more jobs. Once upon a time, taking a school test meant sharpening your No. 2 pencil and concentrating on filling out the answers on a piece of paper. Today, in some circles, that procedure has given way to the click of a computer mouse. An end result of this trend has been the reduction of unnecessary waste. With that in mind, and the explosion in the use of digital printers/copiers, in-plant managers are starting to rethink their production processes. Some educational institutions are already taking notice. At

After initially turning down the job, Hitachi Data Systems' in-plant ended up producing an intricate invitation worthy of being named Best of Show. Sometimes the best work is masked by its apparent simplicity. That's the case with the 1998 In-Print Best of Show winner. To look at the winning piece, a holiday party invitation printed by Hitachi Data Systems, the untrained eye might notice only the lack of colorful artwork and grandiose design. But the trained eyes of our five judges took in all the detail: the intricate spot varnishing, the near-perfect stitching, the sharp registration, the accurate crossovers.

Electronic publishing and print-on-demand systems have helped NASA bring about a quantum leap in the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of its information dissemination. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) looms large in our national consciousness. Here is the agency that has defined for Americans—if not for all humanity—what is humanly possible, with the phrase: "If we can put a man on the moon..." Yet to think of NASA as simply the space agency is to misunderstand its mission. NASA is all about rocket science; but the word to emphasize is science. The purpose of rockets is to better understand the vast and mysterious

The superior capabilities, innovations and vision of the Allstate Print Communications Center make it a role model and a true Industry Leader. If someone took all of the management tips and equipment advice ever offered in the pages of In-Plant Graphics and put them to work in a single in-plant, the resulting "super in-plant" would be equipped to handle virtually any type of print job, from design through mailing. It would report stellar savings to its appreciative management, thrill its customers with service and be a true leader in the printing industry—a model for in-plants everywhere. But such an in-plant doesn't exist,

These days, who can afford a new six-color press? At University of Missouri-Columbia Printing Services, it was just a matter of saving up. How can you buy a brand new six-color press without going into debt—or begging your management for money? Wayne Merritt knows. His in-plant at the University of Missouri-Columbia has just installed a new six-color, 40˝ Heidelberg Speedmaster 102 perfecting press. And he doesn't owe anyone a cent. "In the last four years we have managed to save enough money to buy it outright," reveals Merritt, director of Printing Services. The shop's savings, he added, were about $2

Australian in-plant managers joined with quick printers for the first conference of its kind in Australia. Some things are the same everywhere. One can travel halfway around the world, for example, and still hear about the importance of good service and good communication in a printing operation. Those two themes popped up repeatedly at Pacific Print Congress 98, held recently in Melbourne, Australia. Speakers, both American and Australian, stressed that, in a sea of competition, customers are looking for vendors they can trust; vendors who will go that extra step for them. "Become consultants to these people, not just order takers,"

Four-color jobs, both offset and digital, make up half of the Exxon in-plant's workload. AFTER THE Valdez oil spill leaked almost 11 million gallons of North Slope crude oil onto the Alaska coastline in early 1989, Exxon admirably wasted no time diving into the cleanup and recovery effort. During that process, communicating with government agencies and other outside interests was of crucial importance. Houston's Exxon Print Center was the ready for the task. Boasting 27 employees and a wealth of sheetfed presses, digital printers and bindery equipment, the in-plant printed manuals and brochures filled with four-color pictures chronicling the three-year

Converting to electronic prepress is helping the Marians of the Immaculate Conception in-plant keep up with its ever-growing workload. Keeping up with the needs of some 600 priests and brothers would be difficult for even a large commercial printer. But for an in-plant with a staff of 12, meeting the print production demands of the Marians of the Immaculate Conception—one of the Catholic Church's most successful religious communities—presents a challenge of Biblical proportions. "We're getting busier and busier," remarks Charles Parise, manager of press operations. "The organization's growing." Print runs for the Congregation's religious materials have increased dramatically over the years as the