Ricoh Corp.

As Abbas Badani sees it, print and mail services alone aren’t enough for an in-plant any more. Attracting new customers means catching their attention with unique, value-added services.

It’s been a busy autumn for in-plants around the country. For the second year in a row, the In-plant Printing and Mailing Association has held fall regional meetings, bringing dozens of managers together for a day of networking and education. Recent meetings have taken place in Denver, Muncie, Ind., El Reno, Okla., Sacramento and Nashville, in addition to the gatherings in Harrisburg, Pa., and Baton Rouge, La., already documented in IPG.

Though most of the high-quality newsletters, annual reports and recruitment material for Burlington County College is printed on its in-plant’s four-color Ryobi 524GE, the six-employee operation still produces a good deal of short-run work on its digital printers. Those devices recently got an upgrade, which has improved the quality and consistency of the Pemberton, N.J., shop’s digitally printed pieces.

With equipment specs, pictures and video all available online, why should an in-plant manager bother going to Graph Expo any more? Those who made the trip to Chicago last month have lots of good reasons.

Today is the third and final day of the 2014 SGIA Expo in Las Vegas. The "specialty imaging" show got off to a great start Wednesday, with attendees lining up in the Las Vegas Convention Center to get on the trade show floor.

The Linoprint CV and Linoprint CP models from Heidelberg are geared toward improved flexibility and productivity in the cost-effective production of short, personalized and hybrid print runs. The CV model runs at 90 pg./min., while the CV runs at 130 pg./min.

The In-plant Printing and Mailing Association's fall regional meetings got off to a great start a few weeks ago when 14 in-plant managers met in the Baton Rouge offices of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Louisiana (BCBSLA). The meetings continue today in Mechanicsburg, Pa., where Messiah College is hosting about a dozen managers for a full-day event, sponsored by Konica Minolta.

A new line of Fiery digital print servers are now driving two new families of Ricoh digital presses. Making their debut this week at GRAPH EXPO 14 in Chicago, the EFI Fiery E-43A and E-83A DFEs drive the new Ricoh Pro C7100X series of production color printers, and the Fiery E-43 and E-83 DFEs drive the new Ricoh Pro C9100 series of production color systems.

The official numbers aren't in yet, but the crowds at this week's Graph Expo show in Chicago seemed larger than in previous years. Those who attended certainly had a number of new products to check out. Here are just a few of the new machines unveiled at Graph Expo.

In Australia last month, dozens of in-plant managers flocked to the coastal city of Cairns, not far from the Great Barrier Reef, for the NIPPACON 2014 conference—the annual meeting of the Network of In-house Print Professionals Australasia (NIPPA). They were joined this year by two U.S. in-plant managers, Cathy Skoglund, manager of Operations and Business Development at Arizona State University, and Lisa Hoover, director of Publications at Bucknell University.