Baltimore Mavens...of Print

Always on the lookout for new services to offer, the City of Baltimore's in-plant has taken over data center printing, document scanning, shredding, forms management and more.

IT STARTED in the parking lot. As he stepped out of his car one day, Greg Cooper, print shop manager for the city of Baltimore's Digital Document Division, happened to run into the city's IT director. They started talking about the checks and bills that IT was printing for the city on its Xerox 92C printers. Cooper told him, flat out, that his in-plant was better positioned to handle this work than IT, whose main focus was supposed to be computers and data.

"We're good at putting ink on paper; that's what we specialize in. So give it to the specialists," he reasoned.

His logic, though sound, didn't sway the IT director right away.

"It took a lot of convincing because a lot of people didn't think we could do it," Cooper says. Eventually, though, after upgrading his shop's Xerox DocuTech 180s to highlight color versions and putting security procedures in place, Cooper was able to bring all of Baltimore's IT printing into his in-plant. This included not only vendor checks but water bills, tax bills, ambulance bills, parking fines, reports and more. It was a major coup for the in-plant—one that improved its visibility and its importance to the city.

Since taking over IT printing, Cooper reports that jobs are now output twice as fast. And by eliminating IT's printers, the in-plant is saving the city money; manpower costs have been cut in half. Assuming responsibility for IT printing is just one of the progressive steps that Cooper has taken to bring in new work, add services and make his in-plant indispensable to the city of Baltimore.

Serving B'more With Pride

Home of the Orioles and the National Aquarium, Baltimore is a city of about 637,000 situated on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay. The in-plant is located across the street from city hall, just a few blocks from the picturesque Inner Harbor, a popular tourist attraction.

Since arriving at the in-plant in 2001—after supervising the Maryland Department of Social Services print shop and serving as a reprographic specialist in the U.S. Air Force before that—Cooper's goal has been to run the in-plant like a business, something he's been quite successful at doing so far.

"I've increased the revenue and made it a much more efficient operation," he points out. "My goal is to provide professional services quickly and cheaply to my customers."

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