Business Management - Insourcing

A Web to print solution for one school district that saved thousands, could work for your in-plant. We’ll share steps they took.

As new business models continue to emerge across the dynamic media landscape, in-plants have an opportunity to take a leadership role in reinforcing their strategic relevance. And some of their best opportunities are in capturing new revenues from insourcing, and developing new services by outsourcing and partnering with external firms.

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 These major drivers of print volume have been replaced by documents housed on SharePoint sites and PowerPoint decks to be presented digitally.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.

There was something about the recent In-Plant Printing and Mailing Association (IPMA) conference in Charleston, S.C., that really made it stand out; something more than the great sessions and packed vendor fair; something beyond the fact that Ricoh Americas launched a major color print system there, bringing the event into the national spotlight.

Dwayne Magee of Messiah College offers some advice to in-plants considering insourcing.

Today, insourcing accounts for more than half of the revenue generated by the 14-person in-plant at Woman's Hospital in Baton Rouge. "Becoming a profit center has greatly, if not completely, eliminated outsourcing threats," proclaims Dale Johnson, manager of Graphic and Mail Services.

Providing services of any kind to the Houston Independent School District means thinking big—there's simply no other way to approach the task. Educating more than 220,000 students in a 301-square-mile network of elementary, middle and high schools, HISD is the seventh-largest public school system in the nation and the largest in Texas. With an annual budget in excess of $1.6 billion and a work force of more than 28,000 full- and part-time employees, HISD is a producer and a consumer of services on a truly Texas-sized scale.

Outsourcing state printing work is officially a waste of money in Wisconsin. That was the result of an audit of the Wisconsin Department of Administration, as reported by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel last month.

The Legislative Audit Bureau determined that the state was wrong when it insisted it could save money by outsourcing printing. In reality, according to the audit, the state could save up to $616,500 by hiring 35 state workers instead.

Insourcing is a great source of revenue for in-plants. But what happens if your parent organization frowns upon one of your customers? At Pittsburg State University (PSU), officials declared this week that the in-plant could no longer accept work from politicians, according to a report by KOAM-TV, in Pittsburg, Kansas. Officials worried that taking print work from politicians gave the impression the university was endorsing one candidate over another. (Never mind that all candidates were welcome to bring their work, and politicians paid the same price as other customers.) Though the in-plant manager at PSU did not return IPG’s calls today, he was presumably

INSOURCING PRINTING from outside organizations has become a common practice at in-plants. More than half do it, and that’s been the case for four or five years now, according to our surveys. Our latest research reveals that those who insource get an average of 13 percent of their work this way. A few of the more zealous insourcers say it makes up 75-80 percent of their business, while a handful of dabblers estimate that less than 1 percent of their work comes from insourcing. Most are in the 5-10 percent range. The half that doesn’t insource has its reasons. They’re worried customers will