Muller Martini

State of Washington Olympia, Wash. Despite being one of the country's largest in-plants, the State of Washington's Department of Printing behaves much more like a small company in the way it treats its employees. "We're very pro-people," remarks Dan Swisher, assistant director of the Olympia, Wash.-based operation. "We like to grow from within. We like to involve everybody in our operation. And we like everybody to have fun doing it." To show employees how important they are, Swisher says the department's director, George Morton, visits each employee every single day. With 105 employees, that's a tough task, but the payoff is great. Trying

Safeco Redmond, Wash. No matter how harried his workload gets, Larry Jablinske remains the perfect manager: calm, cool and in control. Perhaps that's because Jablinske is assistant director and manager of Publishing Services for SAFECO, an insurance and financial products company whose customers are primarily independent insurance agents and financial advisors. Working with insurance-related products all day is sure to set your mind at ease and make you feel safe, right? Or perhaps Jablinske is merely comforted by the knowledge that his department and its crew of 104 provide quality, value and service largely unmatched by outside vendors. "We save an average of

Kansas Division of Printing Topeka The Division of Printing for the State of Kansas is already a large operation—$7.3 million in sales, 83 full-time employees, three satellite locations—but Director Richard Gonzales would love to see it expand. "We've consolidated [work from in-plants in] the Departments of Health, Revenue and Human Resources, and have assumed a large portion of the work from the Department of Transportation," says Gonzales. "We visited the print shops, researched their jobs and showed them in black and white what it was actually costing them." Those hard figures helped convince the departments to pool their workloads. For example, the division's newest

By replacing older stitching and binding equipment with new models, in-plants are bringing new business into their shops. by Bob Neubauer It wasn't the automation. It wasn't the ease of use, either. No, the biggest benefit the Heidelberg ST 90 saddle stitcher brought to Minnesota Life Graphic Services was new business, according to manager Tom Neckvatal. "It opened up the doors for us to do work we couldn't do before," he says. With the ST 90, the in-plant could saddle stitch 96-page books, plus covers. This meant jobs like annual reports, catalogs and manuals were now well within the capabilities of the

Print 01 featured numerous innovations in prepress, offset and bindery technologies. Find out all about them in part two of our show report. &002;by Bob Neubauer Walking the show floor at Print 01 was a printer's dream. Presses were churning out color posters, software was being demonstrated on large screens for small crowds, books were being folded, stitched and trimmed—wherever you looked, something was happening. Though the September 11 attacks brought the show to a halt, show management said about 66,300 people attended overall. Vendors reported a number of sales. Heidelberg's NexPress subsidiary sold more than 70 NexPress 2100 presses, part of

Cigna Printing and Distribution Charleston, S.C. If there's one thing John Panhorst doesn't want to do, it's get his hands dirty. Not that Panhorst, assistant vice-president of printing in Cigna's Printing and Distribution department, has a problem with working; he just knows that the in-plant runs a lot more smoothly and efficiently if people don't get in the way of the machines. "We've got our systems so automated that when an order comes in to ship 500 books, the whole thing drops into the demand print queue automatically," he says. "We don't interface with it at all, and frequently we put those

Amway Ada, Michigan. Amway—the little business that could—went from a basement office in 1959 to an estimated $5 billion in retail sales 40 years later. But to long-term employees like Mike King, director of paper products, Amway's success is no accident; it's a manifestation of the pure entrepreneurial spirit of Amway's two creators, Rich DeVos and Jay Van Andel. "In the beginning, everybody thought they were nutso," says King, with a chuckle. "They would drive somewhere to meet 150 people for a demonstration and three people would show up, but they were committed to their idea and they stuck with it." DeVos and Van

Texas Department of Health and Human Services Austin, Texas After years of fighting to keep his in-plant alive, Robert McDaniel has finally been able to spend some time focusing solely on improving his shop. Six years ago, the Texas Council on Competitive Government consolidated 31 state print shops in Travis County, in central Texas, into a mere nine shops. These in-plants, which lack right of first refusal, were also mandated to operate on a full cost recovery basis and forbidden from printing for any type of commercial operation. The result? They were left fighting each other and commercial print shops in a limited pool

Competition among insurance companies is fueling marketing efforts, forcing in-plants to turn out more four-color work than ever. Insurance is a huge market. Its providers make up a major portion of Fortune magazine's annual Fortune 500 listing, with giants like State Farm and Prudential ranking in the top 20. Behemoths like these know how important quality marketing materials are to their businesses, and many of them turn to their in-plants to get them. Because of the competition among insurance firms, these materials must be eye-catching and colorful, a fact that is bringing more color printing work into these in-plants. "Color will sell things

In its first appearance in the In-Print contest, SAFECO took top honors with a colorful marketing piece that required lots of attention to detail. As a perk for its top agents, SAFECO organizes an annual event called the "Conference of Champions," which brings the company's top producers together to attend workshops, mingle with executives and make new friends. Next year that conference will take place in both Vienna, Austria, and Carlsbad, Calif. To motivate its independent agents to work harder and qualify for the free conference, the Seattle-based insurance and financial services firm wanted to send out a quality marketing piece, bursting with color