The Department of State awarded a 10-year contract worth $164 million to its revamped in-house printing and publishing organization, Global Publishing Solutions (GPS). This deal has been discussed and speculated on for months by industry insiders. The Department expects to save approximately $80 million dollars over the life of the contract. GPS has one customer: the government, says Mark Lundi, GPS Director. Their prior relationship no doubt helped in GPS getting the deal - the company has operated a 77,000 square foot Regional Printing Center in Manila for over fifty years.

Workflow and industry expert David Zwang helped GPS land the deal. In the announcement he said, "The entire technology and process base is constructed to ensure that we have easy ways to communicate. Using GPS Link, which is the MIS infrastructure, we can ensure that all of our global facilities and the client base are always connected and able to communicate current and historic process information... Using distributed production, JDF, web to print, and other automating technologies we are able to reduce costs and more importantly, production cycle and delivery times."