Internal Threats to Your In-plant
Despite their best efforts to promote and show their value, in-plants still find themselves targets for outsourcing. In a session at the recent Association of College and University Printers conference, Jack Williams of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and John Wesseling with the University of Cincinnati, both related experiences in which they were taken off guard by outsourcing efforts from within their own universities.
John Wesseling and Jack Williams gave a presentation at ACUP 2016 on internal attempts to outsource their in-plants.
Williams noted that, despite a recent favorable internal review of his in-plant, the retirement of his predecessor prompted an effort to close his shop. University administration issued a directive to begin soliciting proposals from outside vendors for the possible outsourcing of the in-plant.
In the end, only two vendors offered bids, and the in-plant’s costs were lower, so it stayed, but Williams encouraged managers to be ever vigilant and to always know all their costs, because when a vendor challenges them, they will need that information handy to repel the attack.
In Wesseling’s case, it was a sneak attack from an efficiency committee looking into using an outside vendor to manage the departmental printer fleet. The committee decided to add the copier fleet and the copy/print centers into the mix, and Wesseling was not included in the discussions.
Jack Williams related a story at an ACUP session about an effort to outsource his operation.
He learned later that the committee looked at five universities that had outsourced printing. At four of them, outsourcing had been a failure, so the committee only kept data on the fifth.
When Wesseling compared that provider’s rates with his, he showed that outsourcing was financially inefficient. By sharing this information, he was able to have his in-plant spared.
The lesson, both men said, is to look behind the scenes to see what decisions are being made about your operation, and make sure everyone knows the value you provide.
Watch for IPG's extensive coverage of the ACUP conference in our June issue.
