By combining printing with multimedia, LIMRA Business Services gets its company’s message out in a variety of ways.

By Bob Neubauer

The Path to Multimedia

Before it was Business Services, LIMRA’s in-plant was a traditional offset operation with some analog copiers. Its path to multimedia was paved largely through the vision of Bill Maura, multimedia supervisor.

Maura started his LIMRA career 37 years ago in the in-plant. Before Xerox had even come out with a digital copier, he was on the phone with them, asking for a timetable.

In the early ’90s, Maura was instramental in eliminating the offset presses and making the in-plant an all-toner operation after extensive research into the costs, quality requirements and safety issues.

Because LIMRA is a research and marketing firm, it generates a lot of data. Members have always wanted that data as quickly as possible, but research reports often took months to produce in the past. So Maura tried to think of alternate ways to disseminate data.

When the company wanted to distribute copies of the president’s speech, he compressed it onto a floppy disk. Always interested in video, he pushed the department into videotaping sessions and dubbing them onto VHS tapes. When streaming video technology came along, he jumped right on that.

As a result, Business Services has become far more than a support service for LIMRA; it’s an integral part of the company’s research and marketing business. Not only does Business Services help LIMRA present its educational conferences, it distributes the resulting educational materials in formats that clients want.

As a research and marketing firm for life insurance and financial organizations, LIMRA International hosts quite a few conferences—more than 20 a year. When it needs conference brochures and programs, the Windsor, Conn.-based company naturally turns to its in-plant.But printing isn’t this in-plant’s only skill. Called Business Services, the 13-employee operation also provides multimedia services: photography, video recording/editing, PowerPoint support and CD/DVD creation. So for each of LIMRA’s conferences, the in-plant may check speakers’ PowerPoints and fix problems, put those presentations on CD, videotape the sessions, edit them, add music, burn them onto DVDs, print labels and accompanying brochures and mail them.

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Bob Neubauer Author's page

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.

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