Bob has served as editor of In-plant Impressions since October of 1994. Prior to that he served for three years as managing editor of Printing Impressions, a commercial printing publication. Mr. Neubauer is very active in the U.S. in-plant industry. He attends all the major in-plant conferences and has visited more than 170 in-plant operations around the world. He has given presentations to numerous in-plant groups in the U.S., Canada and Australia, including the Association of College and University Printers and the In-plant Printing and Mailing Association. He also coordinates the annual In-Print contest, co-sponsored by IPMA and In-plant Impressions.
"I wanted to be a graphic designer when I started out," reflects Karen Meyers, business manager of Printing Services at Michigan Farm Bureau. Enthralled by a high school graphic arts course, the Grand Rapids, Mich., native enrolled at Central Michigan University, where she majored in industrial supervision and management with a graphics concentration. While at CMU, Meyers took an internship with The Planning and Zoning Center where she helped lay out newsletters during school breaks.
Sometimes you have to search high and low to find what you want. For Doug Bekkering, press and quantity team leader at RBC Ministries, and Doug Eizenga, maintenance engineer at the Grand Rapids, Mich.-based Christian publisher, their search for a press led them to Madrid, Spain.
For Years, the in-plant at Steelcase Inc. received jobs in a variety of disjoined ways: e-mail, FTP and even physical drop-offs. Back in 2006, only about 40 percent of jobs were submitted electronically to the Grand Rapids, Mich.-based in-plant, mostly via e-mail. This had begun to take its toll on the productivity of the five-employee shop.
Faith-based book publisher RBC Ministries was spending too much time and money outsourcing soft-cover books. So in October, the Grand Rapids, Mich.-based company christened a brand new digital print center, equipped with a pair of HP Indigo presses, to bring production of soft-cover books in-house.
OFFSET PRESSES continue to pull their weight amidst the flashy digital printers that have been popping up in offices nationwide. These digital newcomers might be great for short-run work, but for big projects they still must step aside and let ye olde offset workhorses do their thing. Don’t think being called “old” is an insult, though. The longevity of these machines is impressive and can easily add up to decades. Jim VanderWal, production manager at CRC Product Services in Grand Rapids, Mich., says that his shop’s four-color Heidelberg SM102 was purchased in 1989 and the two-color Heidelberg SM72 dates back to 1975. Over
Spartan Stores Grand Rapids, Mich. Annual Sales: $16.4 million Operating Budget: $14.1 million Full-time employees: 90 Part-time employees: 4 Jobs printed per year: 9,620 When it started out 35 years ago with just a one-color duplicator for printing company bulletins, the in-plant for Spartan Stores seemed an unlikely candidate to become one of the largest in-house printing facilities in the nation. But as the century nears its end, that is exactly what has happened. For the second consecutive year, Spartan Stores has ranked tenth on the IPG Top 50 list. There have been some drastic changes at this Midwestern grocery wholesaler shop since the single duplicator days. The
