Leslie Stern is stepping down as CEO at Bell and Howell for personal reasons. The Board of Directors has appointed one of its members, Kamal Advani of controlling shareholder Versa Capital Management, as Interim CEO to serve until a permanent successor is found, a process targeted for conclusion by year-end.
Equipped with an arsenal of digital printing and high-tech inserting gear, the 42-employee print and mail operation at Physicians Mutual processes between 30 and 35 million mail pieces a year for the health and life insurance company.
Fujifilm will show the J Press 720 inkjet press. Heidelberg will present Prinect Digital Workflow Integration. New features for the Kodak NexPress platform will be shown.
Missouri's State Printing Center has relocated, along with the state's mailing operation, into a 250,000-square-foot building about seven miles from the State Capitol. "Because so much of what we print gets mailed anyway, it's really nice to have us all here together," says State Printer Rodney Vessell.
A sudden workload increase came when cosmetics company Mary Kay Inc. shifted the printing and folding of product inserts from outside printing suppliers to the company's in-plant facility in Carrollton, Texas. "It hit us like a ton of bricks" recalls Keith Hopson. "We didn't know it was coming until we were flooded with work."
Roundup of just a few of the inserting machines on the market for in-plants, plus reports from a couple installations.
THOUGH PRINT 09 may have gotten off to a slow start, the crowds eventually showed up. And when they did, many of them headed right for the bindery equipment. Nowhere was that more true than at the Standard Finishing Systems exhibit, which was bustling with activity on the third day of the show, even as other booths appeared to be on siesta. Mark Hunt, director of marketing for Standard, thought he knew why.
“OUR PRIMARY focus really is color,” declares Dallas Johnson, from his office at the University of California-Riverside. “We’ve moved away from black and white. We saw that as sort of a dying market…still see it that way.” With 35 years of printing experience to guide him, Johnson thinks he has a pretty good idea where the industry is headed. So when the director of Service Enterprises decided to move his in-plant away from the “dying” monochrome market and into the more promising world of color printing, he did it in a big way.
When cosmetics giant Mary Kay Inc. departed from the trend of producing products overseas, Keith Hopson, supervisor of Mary Kay Printing Services, in Carrollton, Texas, had to move fast. The company’s decision to make its products in the U.S. included the printing and finishing of leaflets and inserts. “Our world kind of got turned upside-down in August of 2007,” Hopson recalls. “We struggled for about four months trying to keep up with the orders.”
The California Office of State Publishing (OSP) opened a new Digital Print Center last week, consolidating its digital printing and inserting equipment into a 40,000-square-foot facility in Sacramento. The new center became necessary, according to State Printer Geoff Brandt, because of a new $63 million, five-year contract that is bringing in a lot of digital work. The new Digital Print Center will now house the in-plant’s Kodak NexPress 2100 digital color pres, two Océ Variostream 7650 printers, two new Danka 150s and three high-speed Pitney Bowes and Böwe Bell + Howell inserters. Watch for a full story on OSP in the October issue
