Xerox Corp.

Your demands are being heard. Vendors are altering paper content to keep pace with printing technology changes. As an in-plant manager, do you take your paper for granted? Do you follow the trends, or stay with what has worked in the past? If you're an efficient manager, you're always looking for ways to improve. And today's papers can improve the quality of your printing quite a bit. The advent of print-on-demand technology and the increase in color copying and printing have altered the types of paper printers want. Customers now look for brighter, whiter sheets to ensure sufficient contrast with various colors. Manufacturers are

Electronic forms can generate big savings for your organization. Find out how one in-plant is working to implement them. What do electronic forms have to do with an in-plant printing operation? Maybe very little today, but tomorrow you will either be producing forms electronically or be out of the forms printing business altogether—or so say most reliable indicators. The reason for the emergence of electronic forms in the in-plant community is their ability to generate significant cost savings, a fact that will become increasingly evident in most organizations once the proper software is developed and the price for implementation drops. This market is

This year's meeting was a Major League event. One of the most well-attended ACUP conferences to date, it even drew three attendees from England. It was a conference where laughter was a scheduled event, foreign accents spiced up the air and cutthroat betting on autographed basketballs soared into the millions of dollars—all in a city known mostly for baseball bats and horse racing. With a louder than usual roar, the annual Association of College and University Printers (ACUP) conference landed in Louisville, Ky., recently, its record 150 attendees waking up the quiet Ohio River town. Dozens of new schools were represented this

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

Are in-plants obsolete? The folks in charge of the 1998 On Demand Digital Printing & Publishing Strategy Conference seemed to want the world to think so. I attended this five-year-old event last month and was upset to hear a not-so-subtle message being repeatedly stressed to attendees: outsource your printing. Right from the opening keynote session, outsourcing was glorified. If you listened to speakers Frank Casale, of The Outsourcing Institute, and John Stuart, CEO of IKON Office Solutions, you would have thought that sending all printing to an outsourcing firm was the only viable path for a company to take. And that's

These days, copiers are in virtually every in-plant. Find out how in-plant managers are using them, the problems they're facing and the features they want. Are copiers taking over in-plants? The answer varies depending on who you talk to. But no one can deny that convenience copiers are a convenience for more than the end user—and that color copiers are a boon for short-run printing jobs. While copiers are proliferating in in-plants, features are proliferating on copiers. Customers are demanding such features as sorting/stapling, collating and even three-hole punching—and the latest generation of copiers is delivering. New designs reduce paper jams by using

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,

Customers aren't usually motivated to change traditional behaviors and adopt print-on-demand processes. It's your job to help them. The familiar print-on-demand (POD) mantra—print what you want, when you want it and where you want it—can be the source of compelling benefits for in-plant customers. But not every benefit is immediately obvious, or available, to every in-plant customer; nor are these customers necessarily motivated to change traditional behaviors. Therefore, training customers on the benefits of POD is one of several new jobs in-plant managers must take on. Others include understanding the latest information technologies (or forming alliances with those who do) to specify and maintain

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