W. Eric Martin

SOMETIMES ACCIDENTS help you discover a new use for an old machine. Ron Lindgren, manager of Quality Impressions—the in-plant for Avada Hearing Care, in Beaver Dam, Wis.—says his in-plant once ended up with a half-million misprinted envelopes because the wrong original was chosen before printing. To fix the foul-up, the shop designed and printed custom labels, then used its Secap Jet 1 Tabber to position those labels and recover the envelopes. “Without that machine, 500,000 envelopes would have had to be trashed,” he reveals. That’s not to say the 18-month-old Jet 1 Tabber isn’t useful under normal circum

In-plants are getting new business thanks to their laminating capabilities. Find out how to pick the laminator that's right for you. By W. Eric Martin You hardly need to be convinced that lamination is a good thing. After all, bringing an extra layer of professionalism to a job automatically places both you and your client in a better light. But what should you look for in lamination equipment? If you listen to the experts, you want to think big. Really big. "Due to the increase in popularity of 44˝-wide photo-like images, the majority of lamination equipment being sold is wide-format," contends Sol M.

At these in-plants, combining the print and mail departments has not only reduced costs but streamlined operations and allowed more cross-training. By W. Eric Martin When you manage an in-plant, you have a boatload of responsibilities—which is why it may seem strange to hear you should take on one more, specifically, the mail operation."Combining the manufacture of printed documents with their distribution is the most logical of efficient processes," says John Eichmann, the Central Services Division manager for the City of Boise, Idaho, which combined print, mail and office supplies procurement in the 1970s, and has been going strong ever since. Your customers obviously

Despite the growth in color printing, black-and-white copiers still produce much of the work in today's in-plants. By W. Eric Martin With all the new and improved digital goodness popping up in these pages, it's easy to overlook the advances made in those unappreciated machines of yore: ye olde black-and-white copiers. These printing mainstays might not be the most exciting machines an in-plant manager can add to his or her arsenal, but they can't be discounted entirely because sometimes they're still the best tool for the job. What's more, today's models bear little resemblance to the faulty, all-too-easily broken machines that most people

As digital printers and Web pages take work away from offset presses, how has the offset paper market fared? Rather well, say those in the paper business. by W. Eric Martin For years now, wave after wave of digital printing technology has battered the rock-solid shore of the offset market, making lots of noise with each splashy new entrance and drawing "oohs" and "ahs" from onlookers. But just as it takes eons for water to hammer stone into countless grains of sand, the offset industry has easily withstood the competition from digital waters and remains the industry's most popular printing process. Don't believe

by W. Eric Martin On his first day as executive director of printing and publication services at the University of Louisville, Ray Chambers learned that he would be managing a new campus-wide copier management program. "In that first year," said Chambers, "we opened five new centers and grossed $310,000"—a 56 percent increase over the previous year. That quick growth was just one of the reasons that Chambers shared IPG's 1992 Manager of the Year award. Chambers' ability to rise to challenges is best shown by the creation of Cardinal Class Ware, one of the first university copyright clearance centers. It has grown