Russell Gayer

At Tyson Foods, Inc., all management personnel, including CEO Donnie Smith, are birds of a uniform feather. "We all wear khaki to show that we are working managers and not afraid to get our hands dirty," reports Russell Gayer, manager of Tyson Printing Services (TPS).

Russell Gayer has found success right in his own home town. Russell Gayer is devoted to his home town. That's not surprising considering he's the fourth-generation owner of the family house in Springdale, Ark. His great-grandfather bought the property as a homestead back when "frontier" meant a mortgage rate even lower than the current dip. "I met my wife here," says Gayer, print services manager for Tyson Foods Inc. "We both had roots here, and we're very fortunate for all the opportunity that's here. I could probably go somewhere else, but there's no reason to." As a place to carve out a niche

You can't just sit there waiting for customers to find you. They'll find the local quick printer first. Promote your in-plant. Here's how. By MIKE LLEWELLYN &012; "Upper management has a hard time understanding why we would need a sales staff," says Manager Russell Gayer. It's a busy morning at Tyson Food Corp.'s Printing Services Division, down in Springdale, Ark. But Gayer says it could be busier—a lot busier. "The company loses people over a period of time, whether they retire or find other jobs, or whatever," he says. "A lot of times the [new] person that comes in doesn't know what

Tyson Foods Springdale, Ark. Nobody knows which came first, the chicken or Don Tyson's idea for complete vertical integration. But Russell Gayer, manager of printing services for Tyson Foods, knows that his in-plant didn't always print such a tremendous volume of work. "It started out in 1975 as just a little room in the corporate office with a couple of duplicators," explains Gayer, "But over the years it's snowballed into what we have here today." And what the company has is a 62-employee in-plant that prints over 62 million labels a month. That's a lot of snowballing. Tyson's executives charted a course

Going computer to plate has saved in-plants time and money while speeding up production and boosting efficiency. Find out how you can benefit. Up until last year, Rutgers University Mail and Document Services handled prepress pretty much the way it always had. Whenever an offset job came through its doors, the 15-employee in-plant went straight to its 3M camera to shoot negatives. Then, last year, an opportunity arose. "We were re-tooling the department and we had a decision to make," says Jesse Rambo, director of the New Brunswick, N.J.-based in-plant. That decision resulted in the installation of an A.B.Dick Itek DPM2000 platesetter to output