Business Management - In-plant Justification

IT'S HAPPENING all the time in the commercial printing world. No longer defining themselves simply as print service providers, commercial printers are working hard to transition into marketing service providers. It's a difficult journey, but they see this as one of the few viable ways to grow from a price-driven, commodity operation with shrinking volumes and margins into a lucrative business with high profit potential.

In folklore, silver bullets were used to deal with exceptional problems, like monsters. Organizations are dealing with some pretty exceptional problems, too, and “outsourcing” has been touted as management’s silver bullet to deal with them.

To survive and prosper in these difficult economic times, in-plant managers need to ask themselves some soul-searching questions to establish why the department exists and confirm what it offers its host organization, both now and in the future.

The push to outsource any function not directly connected to an organization's core business overlooks the intangible costs of doing business that way, which ultimately impacts the company's bottom line. Your job is to prove your value.

What will your in-plant look like 10 years from now? That question was offered for consideration on a popular in-plant listserv recently. Responses ranged from pessimistic (in-plants will be history) to hopeful (we will provide new and varied services), with some managers sharing tales of downsizing, and others of business growth.

In partnership with InfoTrends, Xerox commissioned a research project that documents the oft-hidden value of in-plants. The results are compiled in a white paper targeted at the enterprise's senior level managers and titled "The Strategic Value of an In-House Printing Operation: Trends and Best Practices."

THE IN-PLANT industry, like many other industries, has been knocked off balance by the economic turmoil of the past several years. As companies have been forced to cut costs, print has been identified as an area of potential cost savings. Gone are the days of 500-page, end-of-year reports and formal printed presentations. These major drivers of print volume have been replaced by documents housed on SharePoint sites and PowerPoint decks to be presented digitally. And now that companies have made this behavioral change, they are unlikely to change back.

When SUPDMC attendees weren't networking or attending sessions, they were visiting Vanderbilt University's impressive in-plant.

ANY TIME in-plant managers get together, the conversation and camaraderie never end. This was particularly true at the recent Southeastern University Printing and Digital Managers Conference (SUPDMC). About 30 in-plant managers from universities all over the southern U.S. and as far away as the state of Washington got together in Nashville, Tenn., to exchange information and listen to presentations to help them tune up their operations.

Never assume, just because your in-plant has been around for ages, that everyone knows about it. Employees come and go, and some of the new ones may never have dealt with an in-plant before, and thus have their own ideas about how print jobs should be handled.