Our recent survey of insurance company in-plants may not have drawn a record response (just 28) but those who did reply run some very large operations. A third of them have more than 50 full-time employees. The median number of employees is 14 and the average is 50.
As the lease on its Xerox 3535 neared its end, The Mississippi House of Representatives’ in-plant had to start thinking about updating its equipment. The shop wanted something faster and less expensive with excellent service support. It found all that in the Xerox 7655, a 40-page-per-minute (ppm) color printer (55 ppm black-and-white) with resolutions of 2,400x2,400 dpi.
IT’S SAFE to say that no one left the 31st annual National Government Publishing Association (NGPA) conference thirsting for more information. Held in Bellevue, Wash., near Seattle, the meeting combined excellent educational sessions with a well-orchestrated plant tour that left many attendees breathless.
MARGARET KLING began her career in the printing industry rather unexpectedly three decades ago. “I had a week-old baby at home,” recalls Kling, “and my sister-in-law wanted me to help out for two weeks, part time...[type]setting some name badges.” Glad to lend a hand, the self-described “stay-at-home mom” took the temp job at First Capital Printing, in St. Louis. There she made a discovery: she had a knack for typesetting.
ABOUT 100 document professionals participated in the recent Digital Printing in Government Forum. Organized by INTERQUEST, a market and technology research and consulting firm, the third annual forum took place in Washington, D.C., on November 5. During the “Leading Vendors Strategies Panel,” which kicked off the event, Elaine Wilde, vice president of sales for Kodak’s Graphic Communications Group, spoke about some leading-edge public sector in-plants that have been using Kodak’s technology:
The print and mail operation for California’s Contra Costa County is making it easier for county employees to order their printing. The 23-employee in-plant recently acquired Presstek’s PathWay Web-to-print solution. Though still officially in pilot mode, the system is already available to more than 1,000 county employees.
It was a month before Christmas at Messiah College, and the president's Christmas cards were cracking. The in-plant at this Christian college in Grantham, Pa., was doing everything it could think of to make the card—one of its most important jobs of the year—look its best. But after coming off of the Xerox DocuColor 260 and being scored and folded, the cards were still cracking on the folds.
"We backed off the pressure on the rollers, we [made] certain that the grain of the paper was going the right way, and we let the cards sit for a few days so that the paper would gather back some moisture. No matter what we tried, we were not happy," says Dwayne A. Magee, director of Messiah College Press and Postal Services.
Make plans to join more than 10,000 print-for-profit and corporate in-plant professionals at the ON DEMAND Conference & Exposition, taking place March 30 – April 2, 2009 at the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia, PA.
THERE HAVE been significant developments that make ink-jet a more viable process and now thrust it into the mainstream of the printing industry. The ink-jet market is growing in every direction, from flatbed and wide-format, to label, to transpromo, to commercial web and sheet. Print head manufacturers are accelerating their developments, and new inks are being introduced almost daily. Today’s ink-jet technologies are undergoing a number of significant quality and performance evolutions. These changes will combine with advances in new jettable fluids and inks, with improved materials handling and substrates—all of which are leading to a new generation of cost-effective printing solutions. But many of these solutions are due in the 2009–2011 time frame.
When Rochester Institute of Technology’s HUB Print & Postal Services was recognized at the recent 2008 Printing Innovation with Xerox Imaging (PIXI) Awards ceremony in Chicago, it was one of only a few in-plants to ever receive one of these prestigious awards. The 21-employee shop won a third-place award in the Books and Manuals category for printing the ImagineRIT Reporter magazine using a Xerox iGen3 110 Digital Production Press. “We were ecstatic,” says Director John C. Meyer. “We realize how wide a range of entries there are from, really, across the world. It was astounding to go to this ceremony and find out people were there from Japan and Bahrain and Australia.”
