Bad In-plant Gets Public Thrashing

The in-plant for the City of Richmond, Va., has gotten a lot of media attention this week—and not the favorable kind.

Both the Richmond Times-Dispatch and the city’s CBS station reported that the in-plant’s 12 or so employees have been spending all their time surfing the Web instead of printing. The reason? Most jobs are being outsourced because it would cost too much to print them in-house.

The Times-Dispatch reviewed print shop activity and discovered that the monthly number of pages the shop printed fell 61 percent since the start of fiscal 2007, and the number of copies fell 41 percent.

The CBS report noted that business cards for council members would cost nearly twice as much to print internally as they would to outsource. So they were outsourced, and the employees filled their time surfing the Web.

Not exactly your model in-plant.

The city auditor told the Times-Dispatch that the shop’s business manager (who surfed 84,034 sites between January and May) said city agencies were avoiding the in-plant and sending their work right to outside printers. And why did they do this? They felt the in-plant’s turnaround time was too long, the business manager said (presumably during a break in YouTube visits).

Ugh. Talk about a black eye for the in-plant community.

To its credit, the CBS affiliate, WTVR, sought out a much better managed in-plant, Chesterfield County General Services, for comparison. The reporter interviewed Charles Dane, deputy director, who said his department handles more than 90 percent of the county’s printing with just six employees and a $550,000 budget. Dane proudly showed off his in-plant’s digital printers and presses, and noted that his in-plant marketed its services to county departments. Now that’s the kind of in-plant we like to see in the news.