Texas In-plants Convene in San Antonio

Since 1977, the Texas Association of College and University Printers (TACUP) conference has been bringing in-plants together from all over the Lone Star State. This year’s event will take place in San Antonio, from October 21-24, hosted by the University of Texas Health Science Center San Antonio.

Day one will feature an all-day workshop entitled “Managing for Survival.” Consultants Ray and Catherine Chambers will discuss successful strategies for dealing with threats faced by in-plants. They will talk about setting budgeted hourly rates, creating a pricing strategy, controlling costs, justifying new equipment, benchmarking and much more—in essence: how to run your in-plant like a business.

The second day will feature a series of roundtable discussions, covering topics like copyright infringement, wide-format printing (and how to take better advantage of it), marketing, Web submission and more. Host Garry Boytos, director of UT Print, will also describe steps he took to turn his in-plant’s business around and how the shop has leveraged wide-format printing: “It’s been a very lucrative business for us,” he affirms—to the tune of nearly $12,000 a month.

On the last day of TACUP, attendees will get to see UT Print for themselves. The 17-employee shop uses two- and four-color offset presses, a Xerox DocuColor 7002, a Xerox Nuvera 144 EA and a Xerox Nuvera 4112, along with an HP 5500 wide-format printer and an HP 5000. To learn more and register for TACUP, visit tacup2012.uthscsa.edu.