Phillips Petroleum Wins Third Best of Show
Excellent crossovers and great color consistency vaulted Phillips Petroleum to its third Best of Show victory in nine years.
by Bob Neubauer
Investors are rather important to Phillips Petroleum Co. The Bartlesville, Okla.-based firm knows, however, that before investors put their money anywhere, they often rely on the opinions of industry analysts.
To impress those analysts with its accomplishments and future plans, Phillips Petroleum puts a lot of effort into designing an impressive, colorful Fact Book each year. And because it needs that piece to be printed perfectly, the company goes to the best printer it can find—its in-plant.
It has never been disappointed.
This year, Phillips has an additional reason to be happy with its 2001 Fact Book. It has been awarded the coveted Best of Show honor in the In-Print 2002 contest.
Impressively, this is the in-plant's third Best of Show award. It previously won in 1994 and 1996 and is the only in-plant other than Boeing to win multiple times. Not only that, Phillips also won two other first place awards in this year's contest.
Tough Deliberations
After a tense, extended discussion by the contest judges, the 2001 Fact Book narrowly beat a beautiful calendar printed by the University of Delaware to claim the top prize. Among other things, the judges were impressed with the color consistency from page to page and the near-perfect crossovers, which are present on every page of the 52-page, saddle-stitched booklet.
About 2,500 copies of the piece, entitled "Creating Value Through Performance," were printed for Phillips' Investor Relations Group.
Bob Slaughter, production control supervisor for the 34-employee in-plant, knew how important it was to produce a top-quality piece.
"You want a grabber," he says. "You want to promote the things we're doing, and to do that, if you get something that's snappy and eye-catching, they're going to probably read and delve into it a little more than if it was just a black-and-white piece."
So he and his staff took extra care while producing the job. He's particularly proud that the plates were produced on a computer-to-plate device. The in-plant used a Barco (now Esko-Graphics) Crescent platesetter with an auto loader and auto feeder. Slaughter is enthusiastic about the very sharp dots the device produces.
"Your dot gain is probably less than a percent," he reveals.
A Team Effort
After the piece was designed, it arrived at the in-plant as a QuarkXpress file with low-resolution scans. Ken Huntley operated the scanner to produce the high-res images. The digital document went through the preflighting and imposition stages, and color dummies were produced on a digital proofer. They were folded and sent out for approval.
Then Russell Buttel used the platesetter to produce plates, which he handed off to Dennis Rickords, a press operator who has been with the in-plant for about 20 years. Rickords took charge of printing the piece on a four-color, 19x25˝ Heidelberg press. From there, Jack Smith folded the booklet on a Stahl folder and bound it on a Muller-Martini bookletmaker.
Slaughter lauds his skilled, dedicated staff for producing such a beautiful piece.
"Quality operators, that's it in a nutshell," he says. "It doesn't make any difference how good your equipment is."
That said, he still sees a need for a larger press and has his eye on an eight-color model. Unfortunately, equipment acquisitions were put on hold after stockholders approved a merger with Conoco in March.
While Slaughter and his staff await word on the fate of their 40,000-square-foot operation, they plan to continue printing the quality pieces for which they've become known—even if they take just a little time to bask in the glow of victory after winning their third In-Print Best of Show award.
- Companies:
- EskoArtwork
- Heidelberg
- People:
- Phillips