Taking Oklahoma by Storm

With its new eight-color press now ready for action, University of Oklahoma Printing & Mailing Services is one of Oklahoma City’s most impressive printers.

April 2008 By Bob Neubauer

multipage

JOHN SARANTAKOS is not shy about revealing his intentions.

“I want to print everything,” declares Sarantakos, administrator of Printing & Mailing Services at the University of Oklahoma (OU). “Obviously that’s not feasible, but that’s always been the goal.”

To bring his award-winning in-plant closer to this lofty ambition, he and his staff recently made a move virtually unheard of in the in-plant sector. They installed an eight-color sheetfed offset press in their Norman, Okla., facility.

Adding the rebuilt 28x40? Heidelberg Speedmaster 102 perfector had become something of a necessity, Sarantakos contends, “because of the vast amount of four-color work we’re doing—and it’s almost all four-over-four.” This includes magazines, brochures, posters and about half of the printing needed by OU’s thriving athletics program, such as press guides for its seven-time national champion Sooner football team.

Though the in-plant already had two five-color presses, the demand for four-color work became overwhelming.

“We’ve been so backlogged for the last couple years, we’ve literally had anywhere between 500 to 1,000 hours of press time backlogged,” Sarantakos says. “That’s one of the things that drove the decision to purchase this press.”

The new press will cut costs, he says, increase throughput and allow the in-plant to compete for additional types of work.

“This is just going to open up new markets,” Sarantakos says. And though he acknowledges that printing “everything” will always be an elusive goal, his in-plant is certainly well positioned to handle nearly any type of job.

A Model Print Shop

With 75 employees working three shifts, Printing & Mailing Services offers everything from design to mail. It has packed plenty of offset, prepress and bindery equipment into its main 45,000-square-foot plant, which the in-plant moved into just three years ago. (Watch a short video of this in-plant.) Most of its digital printing gear is located in a second facility on campus, which also houses Central Mail Services and the Document Production Group. Two satellite copy centers are situated in the Oklahoma Memorial Union building and in the Health Sciences Center in Oklahoma City.

The in-plant has won numerous awards, including more than 100 In-Print awards. Last year it earned two prominent honors from the In-Plant Printing and Mailing Association (IPMA): Mail Center of the Year and a Promotional Excellence award. On IPG’s recent listing of large in-plants, OU ranked 16th according to annual sales—third among university in-plants.

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