Grantham

Bob has served as editor of In-plant Impressions since October of 1994. Prior to that he served for three years as managing editor of Printing Impressions, a commercial printing publication. Mr. Neubauer is very active in the U.S. in-plant industry. He attends all the major in-plant conferences and has visited more than 170 in-plant operations around the world. He has given presentations to numerous in-plant groups in the U.S., Canada and Australia, including the Association of College and University Printers and the In-plant Printing and Mailing Association. He also coordinates the annual In-Print contest, co-sponsored by IPMA and In-plant Impressions.

While the printing world gushed over FSC chain-of-custody certification a few years ago, Dwayne Magee made no secret about his skepticism. “The issue of the environment is important, but having the certification in our shop isn’t a huge issue,” he told IPG in a 2009 article. He had, after all, been duped into obtaining ISO 9000 certification at a previous print shop, with the promise that it would bring new business, which never happened.

The “If you build it, they will come” approach may have worked for Kevin Costner, but it’s bad business advice for in-plants, believes Dwayne Magee, director of Messiah College Press in Grantham, Pa. He prefers “the Goldi-locks philosophy”—not too big, not too small, just right. In today’s unpredictable economy, if current volumes can’t justify it, he advises, forget it.

MANY LARGE companies and organizations have accumulated a haphazard collection of copiers, fax machines and desktop printers over the years. Often these items were purchased by individual departments, from a variety of vendors. That's pretty much the way it's always been at Messiah College too. "Each department makes [its] own choices as far as desktop printers go," affirms Dwayne Magee, director of the Messiah College Press, in Grantham, Pa. "They even put their own ink cartridges in, and everyone has their own sources. There are no savings by purchasing in bulk."

DESPITE THE cancellation of the ACUP conference, ACUP lived on this year in a Webinar that attracted more than 100 in-plant managers from around the world. IPG partnered with the Association of College and University Printers to bring about the event, held on what would have been the last day of the ACUP conference. Three of the speakers who were scheduled to talk at ACUP gave their presentations online. Then, to replicate some of the free-flowing shop talk that is ACUP's hallmark, three past ACUP hosts held a lively roundtable discussion about the latest developments in their shops.

It was a month before Christmas at Messiah College, and the president's Christmas cards were cracking. The in-plant at this Christian college in Grantham, Pa., was doing everything it could think of to make the card—one of its most important jobs of the year—look its best. But after coming off of the Xerox DocuColor 260 and being scored and folded, the cards were still cracking on the folds.

"We backed off the pressure on the rollers, we [made] certain that the grain of the paper was going the right way, and we let the cards sit for a few days so that the paper would gather back some moisture. No matter what we tried, we were not happy," says Dwayne A. Magee, director of Messiah College Press and Postal Services.

With an ear for his customers' needs, Randy Stahl and his team have built a tight, efficient in-plant. By Mike Llewellyn Although central Pennsylvania's Messiah College Press recently added a 42˝ Hewlett-Packard 5500 wide-format printer to its lineup, and even though it's been checking out Xerox DocuTech, Canon and Océ printers to beef up its digital services, Manager Randy Stahl says the in-plant's chief talent is its ability to flourish in a tough economic environment. "One of the biggest things is always doing more with less," he says from his office on Messiah's pastoral, 350-acre campus in Grantham, just outside the state capital. What

More Blogs