Celeste Maia Cron

Do you need new equipment? Keep records, do research and network. Only then can you get what you need. "SHOW ME the money!" A single, colorful line might work for a football star in a movie (Jerry Maguire), but an in-plant manager requesting funds for a new purchase must work like a galley slave to be shown something other than the door. The justification process must start before you even know you need equipment. It must be a daily task involving obsessive record keeping and reams of research. It must not go on in secret. Rather, the higher-ups should be kept

California Office Of State Publishing Sacramento, Calif. Annual sales: $61,333,656 Operating budget: $57,996,000 Full-time employees: 456 Part-time employees: 21 Jobs printed per year: 24,380 When the California Office of State Publishing (OSP) installed a new eight-color Heidelberg M-1000B web press recently it was major news in the in-plant world, where such giant webs are rare. Still, for OSP the installation was, in a way, just a continuation of the growth it experienced through much of the 1990s. "We went [from] having some of the most obsolete technology in our greater Sacramento area, to having some of the most current, sophisticated technology, especially in prepress and in our digital print

California Office of State Publishing Sacramento, Calif. Sometimes when you're big you've got to get smaller to survive. That's what happened in 1996 at the California Office of State Publishing (OSP), the largest state printing operation in the country. That was the year the Sacramento-based operation went non-mandated—when state agencies were no longer required to use the in-plant's services. The result was a significant drop in sales—10 percent over two years—and a corresponding reduction in staff. But the move also reduced some of the privatization challenges being directed at OSP by private sector printers and won the operation a lot of