C.P. Bourg Inc.

MARY BOCCHIETTI’S heart sank when she arrived at the Pueblo City School District’s in-plant one July morning in 2009 and saw three feet of muddy water filling the entire shop. A water main had burst during the night, flooding the lower level of the district’s administration building, where the nine-employee Document Services Center (DSC) resided.

When someone in the Hemet Unified School District approached Reprographics Manager Karl Melzer and asked him if his in-plant could produce yearbooks, he took a look at the sample yearbook presented to him. He was appalled by what he saw. He promised that his shop could produce a better product. Last month he made good on his word.

THOUGH SOME major digital printing equipment vendors may have sat out this year's AIIM/On Demand Conference and Exposition in Philadelphia, all of the key bindery vendors were there, showing off their latest innovations. IPG spent time at all of their booths.

It's every in-plant manager's worse fear. You put in a request for new equipment, then find out your upper management is planning to outsource you. That was the situation Mike Schrader found himself in two years ago. His in-plant at Mercury Marine, a leading manufacturer of recreational marine propulsion engines, had just completed a request for proposal (RFP) to upgrade its digital equipment.

The Desert Sands Unified School District’s Graphic Services department is taking a new approach to yearbook production by installing a Xerox iGen4 digital color press operating in-line with C.P. Bourg finishing equipment. According to Graphic Services Manager John Gildner, the department plans to produce full-color, softcover yearbooks for many of the 20 elementary schools in the southern California school system.

WITH MORE than 1,000 exhibitors expected from more than 40 countries, IPEX 2010 is the British version of Drupa.

During the Winter Olympics in February, Simon Fraser University Document Solutions, in Burnaby, British Columbia, successfully produced a daily 12-page color newsletter detailing the progress of the German Olympics team. The 15-employee in-plant used its Xerox iGen3 to produce 1,600 newsletters a day for 16 days, binding them on its C.P. Bourg BME booklet maker. Digital files were sent from Germany using the in-plant’s WebCRD job submission system, from Rochester Software Associates.

LOCATED ABOUT four miles from the state capitol building in Santa Fe, N.M., the state's Printing & Graphic Services operation has been serving New Mexico for a quarter century. For most of that time, the shop has focused on black-and-white reproduction of business cards, letterhead and forms. High-quality color work, however, was eluding it, and as the demand for this work increased, the in-plant found itself losing business.

To improve the quality of its brochures, booklets, post cards and color statements, the 23-employee printing and mailing operation at Western & Southern Financial Group recently became one of the first in-plants to install the new Xerox iGen4 digital press. Dan Cowan, Print/Volume Document Production Manager, feels the quality of the iGen4’s output is even better than that of the iGen3. “It’s much closer to offset,” he contends.

Despite the sour economy, xpedx is investing. That was the message the company wanted to send when it showed off its new Cincinnati-area print technology center to graphic arts journalists last month. It is reportedly the only U.S. center demonstrating equipment from a variety of manufacturers.