Missouri State University In-plant Back on Campus

Mark McCarty knows something about moving an in-plant. When his shop at Missouri State University relocated in March to a new facility on campus, the experience was all too familiar for the manager of Printing Services.

“This is my third move in 13 years, and I guess experience pays, because this has probably been the smoothest one that we’ve had,” remarks McCarty.

The recent move was done purely as a money-saving venture, he says.

“The building we were in was a leased space,” he says, costing the Springfield, Mo., university around $75,000 a year. “To move us back on campus has saved them that expense.”

The in-plant, which employs two full-time and three part-time people, moved into a renovated building in the university’s downtown IDEA Commons, which it shares with the engineering department and the small business development center. At 9,500 square feet, the new space is slightly smaller than the old 10,000-square-foot shop, but the in-plant was able to fit by eliminating two small presses, a collator and a plate processor that were no longer used.

The shop is now just two blocks from the main post office, and two blocks from its biggest customer, the Office of Publications. The closer proximity to customers is one of the biggest benefits of the move. Though the old facility was only two miles from campus, it was still a hassle for clients, McCarty says.

“Being off campus, a customer, if they were going to come and check a proof or they wanted to come and talk to us about a job, they had to get in their car and drive out to our location,” notes McCarty. Now they can ride the campus shuttle almost to the in-plant’s door.

“Being back on campus has increased our foot traffic in the door and requests for estimates too,” he notes. Plus, he’s been able to line up three classroom tours of his operation. “This helps to align our facility with the strategic mission of the university,” he says.

The new location also puts the shop closer to downtown businesses and government offices, which McCarty hopes to tap for some insourcing business. He’s already approached some of them and brought in a few small jobs, and he expects this to increase once the in-plant installs a digital color press, which it just got approval to do.

Another major benefit for the in-plant is that, by being on campus, it can now use the university’s network connection instead of the much slower DSL line it had been using. For years, retrieving jobs from a shared folder was an arduous process, sometimes taking an hour and a half just to get a single file. Now, pulling jobs from the folder takes seconds.

McCarty says that, when the decision was being made to move his in-plant, no one ever brought up the option of shutting it down instead. That topic came up two years ago, when his former boss retired, but thanks to excellent support from upper administration, “they decided we were well worth keeping and investing some money in,” he says.

The move took six days and was fairly painless. The most challenging piece of the equipment to move was the shop’s two-color, 26˝ Shiva press. Also making the trip to campus was the in-plant’s new Challenge XT370 cutter, its Rosback collator/stitcher, an MBO folder, a two-color Ryobi 3302, a Screen U.S.A. CTP device and an Epson 990 wide-format printer. (The in-plant’s Xerox 700 resides in its campus copy center.)

To keep up with deadlines during the move, McCarty notified customers ahead of time and churned out a lot of work in advance. Some large jobs had to be outsourced while the shop was down. To avoid losing track of jobs while moving, McCarty collected every job ticket and kept them in his car until his new office was ready.

McCarty says it’s nice to be back on campus, and he feels more connected with the university now.

“Even though we weren’t that far off campus, and it was easy to get to us, it still was a little inconvenient, and this kind of makes us part of the family,” he says. “It’s kind of, the ‘prodigal son’ coming home.”