Overhaul Sets Texas In-plant on a Healthy Course

WHEN GARRY Boytos arrived at the University of Texas Health Science Center's in-plant (UT Print) in 2008, he faced a challenging situation.

"The department wasn't thinking outside the box," says Boytos, director of the 17-employee San Antonio shop. "And it was difficult to track and monitor jobs. We had equipment scattered all over. We had too much horsepower in some places, and not enough in other areas where we needed it."

Boytos knew that to effectively compete with outside vendors, UT Print would have to make a lot of improvements. Print operations needed to be centralized, equipment updated, workflow efficiency increased, and the in-plant's services had to be expanded to better compete in today's market.

Providing everything from design and digital duplicating to offset printing and bindery, UT Print generates 300,000 to 400,000 impressions per month. This work includes letters, envelopes, business cards, publications, marketing materials, postcards, pocket folders, posters and more.

To produce these materials, the in-plant uses a mix of offset and digital printing equipment, along with a full bindery. To handle digital printing, the in-plant uses Xerox equipment along with an HP 5500 wide-format printer. On the offset side, the shop has a four-color Heidelberg MO perfector press along with a pair of two-color presses: an AB Dick 9985 and a Ryobi 3685. Among the major jobs produced on this equipment is UT Health Science Center's Mission magazine. The in-plant prints, folds and stitches about 50,000 copies of the 32-page publication three times a year.

The Work Begins

One of Boytos' first moves after arriving at UT Print was to implement a copier management program on campus, to replace the "hodge podge" of copiers from various vendors. To collect usage data from all those machines and input them for billing took many days of work.