Ohio State UniPrint: Always A Team Player

One of the largest university in-plants, The Ohio State University’s UniPrint operation never drops the ball in its quest to support and serve the top-ranking school.

July 2010 By Dawn Greenlaw-Scully

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A Longtime Buckeye Says Goodbye

UniPrint Associate Director Don Roberts retired in June after 51 years with The Ohio State University. Roberts joined Ohio State on December 1, 1958, a month before Alaska joined the United States. In an era marked by the advent of the microchip, the office copier, the Barbie doll and American astronauts, Roberts was hired as an apprentice pressman, training on equipment that was a far cry from modern printing technology.

“At that time, we were not even using offset presses,” he recalls. “We were hand-setting type and using a linotype for letterpress printing.”

Operations were much smaller, too. “We worked on the first floor of the journalism building in a space that wasn’t even a quarter of the size of our present facility,” Roberts remembers. “We moved into our current plant in 1968”—the same year that Ohio State’s football team won its fifth national championship.

Through the years, Roberts worked his way up the ladder, serving as pressman, foreman, plant superintendent, assistant director and finally associate director of what is now UniPrint. He was a longtime supporter of the Big Ten Printing and Copyright Conference, and a 20-year member of the Association of College and University Printers (ACUP).

Roberts, who retired on June 30, measures the success of his career in terms of the in-plant’s advancement and reputation.

“I’m extremely proud of what we’ve maintained all those years, and of what we’ve grown to,” he notes. “The in-plant is well respected by the university and the community. It’s been a great place to work.”

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The Ohio State University is big. It ranks among the country's largest colleges (and is sometimes tops) in terms of student enrollment. Its famed horseshoe-shaped football stadium holds and consistently draws more than 100,000 Buckeye fans and rivals to Columbus, Ohio.

The school's in-plant is also a heavyweight among its peers. In-Plant Graphics' December 2009 survey of the largest in-plants in North America lists Ohio State's UniPrint operation as the number-one revenue-producing ($18 million) university shop and as having the fourth-most employees (81).

Led by Director Debby Parks, Associate Director Don Roberts, and Assistant Director Jeff Dible, UniPrint works in unison with the university to ensure that bigger remains better.

The in-plant has been putting ink on paper for more than 75 years. In 2006, printing services merged with other units to form UniPrint, and now encompasses Document Management Services (DMS), the Cost Per Copy program, the Printer Cost Management (PCM) program, student printing labs, and even microscope repair.

"We felt that the best thing for us to do was consolidate all of our offerings under one roof," reports Roberts, who retired just last month, after 51 years with the in-plant. "And it has worked out very well."

Within a 44,000-square-foot facility, UniPrint offers offset printing and duplicating, digital printing, high-speed copying, wide-format printing, and finishing and binding, as well as addressing, warehousing and distribution services.

Working three shifts, the production department produces 18,000 to 20,000 jobs annually, including business cards and university stationery, brochures, admissions and recruiting materials, and plenty of work for Ohio State's athletic department and extension system.

"We print about 85 percent of the university's work," Roberts calculates.

Campus customers deal with UniPrint entirely by choice. The in-plant does not have the first right of refusal for jobs. So, UniPrint has to work for its work.

Sales Force Keeps Shop Busy

"Within the last two years, we've added a complete sales staff," Roberts reveals. Five salespeople "spend all day on campus" selling customers on UniPrint.

"The sales force has been really beneficial," he declares. "As certain types of work dry up, such as publications, we have to replace that work."

For example, when the Office of Human Resources and University Health Plan decided to make its Netwell publication a Web-only endeavor, UniPrint lost a $60,000 job.

"So, we turned around and began calling on a new prospect, University Development, and now we're doing almost all of their work," Roberts concludes.

In-plant Snapshot
The Ohio State University
UniPrint

Employees: 81
Operating Budget: $18 million
Facility: 44,000 square feet

Key Equipment:

• Rampage Workflow for offset
• Xerox FreeFlow workflow
• Avanti Print Management Software
• Kodak computer-to-plate system
• Heidelberg Quicksetter CTP
• Two-color, 14x20˝ Heidelberg Quickmaster
• Two-color, 10x13˝ A.B.Dick duplicator
• Two-color, 10x13˝ Halm envelope press
• Six-color, 20x29˝ Heidelberg with aqueous coating
• Five-color, 28x40˝ Heidelberg
• Two-color, 28x40˝ Heidelberg
• Kodak NexPress 2100
• Xerox 6180
• Xerox Nuvera 144
• Xerox 7000
• Epson 9880 wide-format printer
• Epson 10000 wide-format printer
• EFI RASTEK H700 wide-format printer
• MBO folder
• Heidelberg Stahl folder
• Two Muller Martini saddle binders with cover feeder
• GBC spiral binder
• Duplo 5000 tower collator with booklet maker
• Duplo 645 slitter/cutter/creaser
• Polar cutter
• Ledco laminator
• SECAP ink-jet addressing
• Neopost four-station inserter
• CASS certification and NCOA processing

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	EFI, Jetrion Industrial Inkjet Systems		Eastman Kodak Co.		Heidelberg
	Xerox Corp.

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Ohio State UniPrint: Always A Team Player

One of the largest university in-plants, The Ohio State University’s UniPrint operation never drops the ball in its quest to support and serve the top-ranking school.

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