Two events are driving this rant. One involved a conversation with a commercial printer, who stated, and I think really believed, that public organizations, like state and local government, should not have in-plant printing operations. He said that he had tried to hire a couple of former state print shop employees and “they didn’t work out.” He seemed to think that all state employees were defined by his experience with these two. The other was a response I received to my observation about the absence of academic research supporting the argument that outsourcing the print shop reduced the cost of printing to the organization. In both cases, public employers were characterized as being lazy and non-productive. One even used the term “state worker mentality.” I couldn’t agree less!
I worked in the public sector for most of my career, including over 20 years in state government, and the phrase “state worker mentality” is offensive to me. The men and women I know are hard working and dedicated folk who do a great, if thankless, job for their organizations.
When the legislature of my state mandated that my agency print and distribute 1.5 million, two-color, 16-page booklets in about a month, state workers got the job done because no commercial shop would take on the project. Oh yeah, we got the rest of the printing our agency needed out as well.
It was state workers who took the lead in fighting high printing costs at my agency by routinely offering suggestions to our customers on ways to reduce printing costs. This effort was so successful that the commissioner of the agency implemented a policy requiring anyone who chose not to follow one of our cost-saving suggestions to get written approval from his/her deputy commissioner. That’s sort of like getting your vice president to sign off on a print job.
We initiated split schedules that allowed us to get 60 hours per week out of our most productive equipment without overtime, and we set up production schedules and just-in-time printing to minimize waste and inventory. When the legislative budget committee took longer than expected to produce the budget one year, it was state employees who produced 500 copies of a 1,000 page book over a weekend to meet a legislative deadline because, once again, no commercial shop in the area could do it.
And when our equipment sales reps wanted to show off their equipment to prospective buyers, did they take them to the large commercial shops in town that had some of the same gear? Nope. They brought them to the state in-plant. Why? Because we ran twice as much work with half the manpower as the commercial shop.
You don’t have to look very far to find stories like these about all in-plant managers. And yet public in-plant managers have been under the outsourcing gun for years—not because we don’t do a good job, but because special interest groups see the pubic sector shops as fair game.
Various outsourcing and commercial printing advocacy groups, as well as commercial printers, have an agenda that includes promoting outsourcing and shutting down public sector shops. But being “for profit” doesn’t equate to being “efficient.” It just means you can charge more than it costs you to operate.
Are there state workers out there that don’t perform as well as they could? Probably, but they are exceptions. We could all tell stories about inefficiencies and poor performance in the private sector as well. Cutting off a piece of the organization is not going to fix that. So let’s not paint a large group of dedicated workers with the state worker mentality brush. It simply isn’t true. If you ask me, the state worker mentality is about doing more with less and doing it well.
The unfortunate truth is that we, as in-plant managers, don’t have the equivalent of a PIA or a NAPL to tell our story. That’s why it is so important that we brag on ourselves. My commissioner believed his agency’s print shop was doing a good job because we told him so, every chance we could.
But the other point is that, as managers, we have to be sure that we have a story to tell, and that means finding ways to motivate our people and making sure they have the tools they need to do the job.
So how about it? This is my story. What’s yours? (Share your Comments below.)
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- Business Management - In-plant Justification
Ray Chambers, CGCM, MBA, has invested over 30 years managing and directing printing plants, copy centers, mail centers and award-winning document management facilities in higher education and government.
Most recently, Chambers served as vice president and chief information officer at Juniata College. Chambers is currently a doctoral candidate studying Higher Education Administration at the Pennsylvania State University (PSU). His research interests include outsourcing in higher education and its impact on support services in higher education and managing support services. He also consults (Chambers Management Group) with leaders in both the public and private sectors to help them understand and improve in-plant printing and document services operations.