Yaphank Neck Bay Harbor Inlet Point, N.Y. – Ludd Reprographics, a 48-year-old provider of quick printing services, recently pulled the plug on its two-year-old Print MIS system.

“All this computer stuff was just complicating things,” said Ned Ludd, who had founded the company with his older brother in 1971. “We were always fixing entries in the computer rather than doing the important make-good printing we excel at. Customers don't want us to be good at dBaseIII...they need us to be good at the two-color duplicator work they so desperately want. We also realized that handwritten invoices brought us into a closer and more personal relationship with our clients.” Replacing the state-of-the-art Print MIS will be Sally, who, said Ludd, “works in the back.”

"Sally's been here for years, and helped us through our problems getting PageMaker working again,” continued Ludd. “The problems were in a DOS revision that Microsoft stopped supporting. Something should be done about the way they abandoned us! Whenever we called them, they asked us if we were OS/2 users. Goes to show they don’t have qualified people in that company any more. It’s a darn shame.”

Wen it comes to improving productivity and overall knowhow, Sally has become Ludd Reprographics’ secret weapon. “All of our company hinges on what Sally does and says,” said Ludd. All of that is remarkable given that Sally has been out of the industry for a while, but was able to pick right up where she left off. “She reads all of the trade publications,” said Ludd. “Just this week, she’s been catching up on all the issues of TypeWorld and Inland Printer that we’ve been saving for her.” Ludd admits that Sally’s “gap years” are a bit of a mystery. “We don’t know where she was all that time, but it had ‘correctional’ in its name, so we think it was a place where you learn how to edit documents. We’re glad she’s back. She’s made a lot of welcome changes. Getting rid of that horrible software was a great start.”

Fred Potrzebie, production manager, especially likes the company uniforms. He said the orange overalls make it easy to spot the employees and ensure they are performing their assigned tasks. Jack Touhy recently joined the company in collections. "Sally made another great hire for us,” said Ludd. “He’s a baseball fan, and brings a Mickey Mantle baseball bat as a conversation piece when he visits companies that may be overdue in their payments.” Ludd had wondered why Jack would bring such a valuable piece of memorabilia with him—after all, it might become damaged and lose its value. “Jack said not to worry,” said Ludd. “The owner of the bat didn’t need it hanging on a wall anymore, so it was there for the taking.”

Ludd feels these are just a few of the positive changes that Sally has brought about that will take the company down to the next level.

“We just got an order for 10,000 make-goods,” said Ludd. “We can’t keep business from coming back in the door!”

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