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As appearing in The Seybold Report - Nov. 23, 2005

Article prepared by C. Clint Bolte, C. Clint Bolte & Associates, Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. For additional information please call 717-263-5768, fax 717-263-8945, or e-mail to clint@clintbolte.com.

Hurricane Can't Stop Publishing Association's Annual Meeting

National State Publishing Association's 29^th Annual Conference

The annual gathering of the National State Publishing Association, originally scheduled for Biloxi, Miss., two weeks after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, was in jeopardy of being canceled. The association's headquarters in Hattiesburg, Miss., was also incommunicado.

The event was rescued thanks to volunteer leadership throughout the nation, which regrouped via conference calls so that this primary networking fete could be rescheduled as soon as possible. Retaining the enthusiasm of the original Mississippi hosts, they were able to find a resort location in the northern part of the state in Tunica, Miss., near Memphis, Tenn. Virtually all of the speakers and most of the registrants were able to rearrange their schedules and gather for the annual NSPA event in late October.

Forty-eight government employees (representing 20 states) and vendors brought the total attendance to nearly 85, which was actually up a third from the previous year. That might not sound overwhelming until you realize that the entire association has just 106 members. Not many trade associations can claim such a high-percentage commitment and attendance at their annual meetings.

As it heads into its third decade, the NSPA officially changed its name to the National Government Publishing Association to reflect its broader public sector membership appeal. NGPA (govpublishing.org) might not be very well known in the printing industry as a whole. Its purpose is to bring public sector publishing officials into an organization through which they can work to improve the management of publishing efforts through educational programs or publications. The association exchanges information and cooperates toward more effective production and procurement of publishing products and services. NGPA has as a major goal attaining greater efficiency and economy at all levels of government.

In addition to top-level training and networking, this conference included working sessions for the NGPA members to participate in the association's strategic planning process. The proposed vision statement for NGPA is to be the choice for government print agencies, publishers, document and information management groups for the most current, reliable information and education about the public sector information management industry.

"Leveraging Industry Transformation to Success" was a key presentation made by Theresa Mattioli, Southeast Regional Sales Manager for the Kodak Graphics Communications Group. She suggested that industry leaders across vast product specialties and regions were pursuing a number of common goals: (1) redefining themselves as graphic communications solutions providers, (2) expanding the services provided to their clientele, (3) mastering variable data applications and (4) acknowledging shorter production cycles as selling style opportunities. To both assist with as well as to become more effective on short fused, complex projects these leading edge vendors work to be "consultative and collaborative with clients" by getting in on the planning and design of programs well before specifications are defined.

An example of expanded services is the State of Minnesota's Printing Services adding both IT and Mailing Services. As more complimentary and supplementary services are added, Mattioli commented, "Managing blended environments" becomes a crucial management information system challenge.

She showed samples of successful variable data personalization programs that could be emulated by many conference attendees. Every state has tourism initiatives which could be better met as a combination of website access by prospective tourists, collection of variable data aligning with the tourists interests and then a fulfillment program to print colorful personalized documents to be mailed out in a timely fashion. This is well illustrated on the URL: bermudatourism.com.

Every college and university would like to have a higher profile with alumni as part of their financial development and with prospective students. Smaller schools want to use colorful image enhancing communiqués to drive enrollment. Hartwell College in Hartwell, Oregon and D'Youville College in Buffalo, New York were two such examples of innovative personalized acceptance letter packages pointed out by Ms. Mattioli

Washington State Department of Printing has been offering fulfillment services to its agency clients for six years. They now include an online storefront and print on demand capabilities from 32,500 square feet of offsite warehousing. Nearly 200,000 packages containing over 31 million items will be shipped this year on behalf of twenty-eight active public sector customers.

According to Washington's Fulfillment Manager Jennifer Forte, "Among the many benefits realized by agency clients is their ability to concentrate more employees on their primary mission rather than the administrative task of running a warehouse." Clients are charged the equivalent of $36/hour for labor services, a 5% mark up on material costs and actual storage costs used. Annual fulfillment revenues generated by the 8 employees are expected to be about $900,000 this fiscal year. Because of the normal seasonality nature of most fulfillment activity this later way of charging storage fee is an advantage as most in-house warehousing incur the full square footage burden month in and month out rather than the actual skid slots consumed.

These fulfillment services have clearly driven additional value added volume for other departments within State Printing. For example, the daily fulfillment mailings for the Departments of Revenue and Social & Health Services will include more automated variable print and the use of smart inserters in mailing.

"An early lesson learned" commented Forte, "was to limit the number of free items given to any single requestor." Additional savings are expected to be passed along shortly as volume purchasing agreements are being negotiated with the global courier services. Among the near term challenges that Forte feels is critical is to improve the warehouse management system software and specifically inventory tracking. Avanti is the print MIS package being used by Washington Print Services and is being considered to accomplish the objective of managing more of these blended services under a single MIS umbrella.

Bill and Mark Subers, owners of the Complete Grade Finders, discussed paper trends. "Brightness ratings are climbing for some basis weight stocks. This is being driven in part by foreign papers." International Papers with their VIP technologies is also driving the increased whiteness and brightness, which is helping to knock out the opaque market.

Dupont Titanium Technologies specialist Mike Evans offered suggestions on saving money on paper purchases while not sacrificing print quality. While higher basis weight stock provides better opacity and less print show through, it increases postage costs. To counter that distribution cost bump try lighter weight stocks with improved opacity ratings to achieve the same good print results. European and Asian papers are gaining in popularity as their manufacturing includes more coating and therefore the stock is brighter. However, their trees are more expensive and therefore the paper has less pulp fiber content resulting in lower opacity and desirable stiffness.

A few years back Health Cajandig was hired by the University of Missouri to develop a website digital store front to drive the transition from analog to digital submission of files. Ninety-nine percent hard copy input successfully moved to 90% digital transmission in less than three years. EFI hired him to be product manager for their Digital StoreFront. He presented the basics of this technology and indicated that the State of Washington was utilizing DotEdit^TM while State of Massachusetts was embracing PageFlex^TM as their digital storefront platforms. EFI is aggressively pursuing these increasingly popular digital storefront software applications by hiring more programmers in India, Romania as well as Atlanta to bolster their resources.

The vendor panel acknowledged that most all states were not giving their in house print services any appreciable capital budget to replace aging equipment or to move into new technology applications. It was pointed out that the Federal GSA schedules were being offered to and used by state and local governments as a means of saving money. Linda Belisle of North Dakota commented from the audience that her state insists upon competitive bidding rather than reliance upon the GSA schedule and in fact gets lower prices with regularity than indicated in the GSA schedule.

A Mississippi representative commented that because of seasonality of print demand it was more economic to have annual metering rather than the historic monthly or quarterly metering arrangements offered by copier manufacturers.

With dozens of gulf coast printers experiencing water damage to equipment from the recent hurricanes, a number of manufacturers recommended a sound buyer protection caveat. Any printers considering buying used equipment "really cheap" off the Internet or through an unsolicited source should first give the item serial number to the original manufacturer. Virtually every manufacturer can give the maintenance history for parts or service purchased from them and the machine's geographic location.

Bob Neubauer, Editor of In-Plant Graphics, has personally visited hundreds of in-plants and wrote about many successful case studies. His presentation on "Marketing Your In-Plant" concentrated on several proven techniques. A web site is essential and an excellent means of passing along technical tips as well as allowing clients to submit work. An annual open house is an opportunity to include vendors. Monthly print shop tours for new employees as part of their orientation provides good public relations. Customer surveys with feedback to the print staff can be very effective.

Because centralized print services often plays an integral role in qualifying outside print vendors for agencies that either buy directly or through formal purchasing contracts, Bill Van Buskirk of Heidelberg passed along an innovative approach used by the Federal Government Printing Office. The GPO hosts Vendor Days to introduce Federal Agencies to qualified print vendors. This saves their print coordinators time from personally interviewing print salesmen who want to come to their office plus eliminates the excuse of dealing with a print vendor who has not gone through the formal qualifying process.

Next year's NGPA conference will be held in Rochester, New York.

Article prepared by C. Clint Bolte, C. Clint Bolte & Associates, Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. For additional information please call 717-263-5768, fax 717-263-8945, or e-mail to clint@clintbolte.com.