Putting Their Best Foot Forward

As Mark Baker sees it, providing prompt, painless service is imperative at his company.

"Our brands enjoy being able to get something done immediately," says the manager of Office Services for Wolverine Worldwide, a footwear and apparel manufacturer based in Rockford, Mich.

When a photo shoot for a product catalog gets delayed and customers are scrambling to meet a deadline, they know they can rely on Baker's 10-employee in-plant to print, bind and deliver that catalog without delay.

"We're very good at filling short-run [orders] immediately," proclaims Baker. "We've filled a gap that was impossible to fill with outsourcing."

Lightning-fast turnaround isn't the only reason customers appreciate the in-plant, though. The department provides such a range of services that the company's 16 brands find themselves returning again and again. Besides digital printing, binding and mailing, the shop offers high-speed scanning, USB drive and DVD duplication, data entry, copier fleet management, wide-format printing/mounting, management of the office supplies contract with Staples, interdepartmental mail/package delivery, and much more. Baker is always on the lookout for new services his operation can offer to benefit the company.

"We should take on any service that makes sense and keep as productive as possible to keep the cost down," he explains.

The in-plant's 3,093-square-foot facility is packed with digital printing, binding and mailing equipment (see sidebar). It's located inside the western Michigan corporate headquarters of Wolverine Worldwide, whose brands include such big names as Hush Puppies, Sebago, Merrell, Bates, Chaco and CAT Footwear. In 2012, Wolverine acquired the Performance + Lifestyle Group (PLG) of Collective Brands, which added Keds, Saucony, Stride-Rite and Sperry to its brands.

Along with those new brands, Wolverine inherited PLG's small in-plant in the Boston area, which housed a pair of Xerox DocuColor 8080s and a Xerox Color 550.

"When we acquired them, I was asked to go out there and take a look at their [printing] operation," Baker says.

Since that in-plant produced only around 150,000 impressions per month, while his shop's output was closer to 600,000 a month, Baker determined that the 8080s would better serve the larger operation.

"So I brought those 8080s here to Michigan," he says, "and gave them a Xerox 700" with an inline square fold booklet maker. The Boston in-plant had previously had no inline stacking or finishing, Baker says, so he added an in-line booklet maker to the shop's Xerox Color 550 and installed a new Xerox Color 560 and Xerox D95, both with in-line booklet makers.

After this rightsizing was completed, he and the manager of the Massachusetts shop, Richard Corrigan, offered the services of both in-plants to all 16 brands, a process facilitated by the addition of EFI's Digital StoreFront Web-to-print software at both operations. The Boston-based customers were initially uncomfortable with the chargeback concept Baker introduced, since they had only paid a small click charge previously. When they saw the advantages they were getting, though, most of them came around.

"Over the last two years…they've come to appreciate the quality is higher than what it was, and the prices are still one third to one half what they could get going outside—but faster," Baker says.

Building a Reputation

It wasn't always this way, though. When Baker started with Office Services 12 years ago, after spending four years in the company's IT department, it was more of a copy shop, printing corporate presentations and doing between 50,000 and 75,000 impressions a month.

"The first thing I noticed was, why aren't we doing [more work] for the brands?" he wondered. His inquiries soon revealed the reason: poor quality work.

To address this deficit, he brought in a pair of Konica Minolta bizhub PRO C6500s and marketed the improved quality to the brands. They liked what they saw. Print volume grew to 200,000 impressions a month. When he replaced those machines with Xerox DocuColor 8002s with inline booklet making, volume jumped to about 600,000, where it remains today.

The most visible of the in-plant's products are the catalogs and buyers' guides it produces to show off shoes and apparel manufactured by Wolverine Worldwide's brands. The shop prints runs of up to 2,000 in-house, then saddle stitches or twin-loop binds them.

Other items the in-plant prints include gift certificates, post cards, letters, newsletters, posters, marketing material and name badges for sales meetings. Some of its printed pieces make their way into shoe boxes, such as "bounce-back cards" offering a discount on the next purchase, or bar-coded package labels. The in-plant prints, inserts and mails about 60,000 invoices, statements and credit memos per month.

Posters are a growing business for the in-plant. The shop uses two 44˝ Epson printers to produce brand collateral posters and signs for meetings and trade shows. The in-plant offers foam core mounting as well. Wide-format printing brings in $45,000 worth of business a year, Baker says.

"It's a great add-on service," he remarks. "I love it."

Scanning and Drive Duplication

The shop got into scanning after Wolverine Worldwide's customer service facility moved to Indiana. When customer returns arrived at the warehouse in Michigan, the accompanying paperwork needed to be sent to Indiana.

"So rather than just sending it all FedEx, we scan that now into PDF," says Baker. He offered to use the scanner on the shop's Xerox 4127 to do this, and the service has taken off.

"We do quite a bit of high-speed scanning," he notes.

He plans to replace the 4127 in January with a Xerox D125 and is currently evaluating a Fujitsu fi-6770 scanner as a backup device.

The in-plant also started offering DVD burning and USB drive duplication, which are very popular in advance of the company's May and November global sales conferences. Baker added an Aleretec 21-port USB flash drive duplicator.

"So we can burn 21 USB drives simultaneously," he remarks. "It's very easy to use." The shop offers this as a free service, and it's very popular.

Providing resources like this, he says, reinforces the value the in-plant brings to the company.

"We have to show our value all the time," Baker notes. Though the brands are free to use outside printers, he feels he is slowly winning them over. Once they try the in-plant and see the quality of its printing—delivered quickly and at a low cost—customers tend to keep coming back, he says.

To get more work, Baker tries to convince brands that using the in-plant saves them enough money that they can increase their marketing efforts.

"Because of our pricing, you can afford to do more [printing] and drive your revenue with the marketing collateral," he points out. "I'm constantly selling our services. I'm always trying to bring in more business."

To build good will, the in-plant prints and ships personal items for employees for the same low rates that internal customers pay. The shop also prints jobs for local charities, city offices, police departments, churches and school groups.

Looking ahead, Baker has plans to upgrade the shop's digital printing capabilities. He says he's impressed with the new Xerox Versant 2100, which would increase color printing speeds from 80 to 100 pages per minute.

"We need to continue to push high quality and maintain that turnaround time, which is one of our key benefits," he explains.

When he ponders how Office Services has expanded over the years into the impressive, well-respected, valuable asset it is today, he can't help but feel satisfied.

"I'm proud of what we built here," he declares. "I love my job."