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When the Admissions department at Rochester Institute of Technology—the biggest customer of RIT's Print and Postal Hub—turned to Director John Meyer for help with increasing enrollment, he gave the project his full attention. Admissions had set a goal to increase enrollment by 10 percent a year for the next 10 years.

Most in-plants need to get busy developing cross-media marketing services, or they run the risk of losing their relevance—and their franchise.

Most of the finishing touches at Highmark's two main Pennsylvania facilities are applied using inline equipment from C.P. Bourg. In Pittsburgh, three of the Xerox iGen4s have Bourg BMEx booklet makers with BCMEx creasers, and all three Nuvera 288 EAs at both the Pittsburgh and Camp Hill locations have Bourg BDFx finishers to stitch, fold and trim booklets, reports and various other documents.

WAYNE FRENCH didn't need a crystal ball to see what was coming. With two Shinohara presses, his in-plant at Ithaca College was proficient at churning out long runs of materials for the 119-year-old private school. The trouble was, these pieces were largely being warehoused, where many became outdated before they could be used.

NESTLED NEXT to Omaha, Neb., the Village of Boys Town is small and self-contained, but the impact of the Boys Town organization headquartered there is far-flung and boundless. Founded by Father Edward J. Flanagan in 1917 as a home for boys who needed one, Boys Town now describes itself as "one of the largest, publicly funded non-profit child-care agencies in the country

Now in its 18th year, the On Demand Conference and Exposition tried something new this time when it moved south of the Mason-Dixon line to the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C. Not everyone was happy with the results. Though some exhibits were packed at intervals, others were not so busy. Perhaps the absence of key companies like Xerox, Kodak, Presstek and Standard caused some potential attendees to skip this year's event. Or maybe D.C. was too far for the Northeast day trippers who attended previous years' shows in Philadelphia, Boston and New York.

BACK IN 1996 or so, at the On Demand Show in New York City, there was a pleasant reception at an artsy gallery with great munchies, a bunch of gorgeous fashion models and a plethora of digital print visionaries, illuminati, vendor execs, and assorted hangers-on. It was the launch of PODi—the Print On Demand Initiative.

The “If you build it, they will come” approach may have worked for Kevin Costner, but it’s bad business advice for in-plants, believes Dwayne Magee, director of Messiah College Press in Grantham, Pa. He prefers “the Goldi-locks philosophy”—not too big, not too small, just right. In today’s unpredictable economy, if current volumes can’t justify it, he advises, forget it.

In-plants have the opportunity to change the scope of their offerings by adding the same kinds of non-print services offered by many commercial operations. These new offerings—often termed cross-media or integrated services—typically involve some type of outgoing marketing offers or other communications to customers or prospects.

It's hard to believe, but Graph Expo will begin in just nine days. Though the absence of such regulars as Heidelberg and Komori has been duly noted, the graphic arts trade show will still be bursting with new technologies for in-plants to peruse.