Glenn Arnold is Vice President of Internet Solutions at Smith & Sons Printers. Glenn has a Bachelors Degree in Electronic Composition from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He joined Smith & Sons Printers in 1986, in charge of their Composition Department. His responsibilities include their Intranet Job Flow Project (IJFP) and Internet Solutions for clients.

Smith & Sons Printers is a flat sheet printer with a full in-house job flow on computers (18 stations), 14 ABDick 360s, 2 ABDick 375s, all with t-heads and envelope feeders, 1 ABDick 385, Kluge (for numbering), Heidelberg (for embossing), full bindery including book machine and perfect binder.

Glenn, tell us about the type of jobs you do and your growth rate into 2001.

Up-up-up! We plan to expand sheet output capacity by 300% over the next 5 years while increasing labor requirements by only 100%; the IJFP will also reduce our error margin to less than 1%.

We're a flat sheet corporate accounts printer - letterhead, forms, mailers, business cards; our largest outputs are roughly 30,000,000 sheets of carbonless, 10,000,000 No. 11 or smaller envelopes, 2,000,000 7x10 or larger envelopes, and 15,000,000 business cards per year. This doesn't count the other typical jobs presented to a commercial printer like letterhead, books, etc. We have our own prepress and bindery, so we do most everything in-house. We are proud of what we get done with less than 20 employees, but our neighbors/competitors still consider us a "backyard" shop.

What exactly is the Intranet Job Flow Project?

We started the Intranet Job Flow Project (last year). The focus is to automate and incorporate all divisions of the plant - ordering, composition, preflight, press, bindery, shipping, outsourcing, inventory, hr and ar/ap into one system. The business card line was the first to begin using the system and we saw the error rate drop from an average of 3 cards a week to 1 card every 3 weeks. We were also able to bring two more presses on-line just for business cards without having to hire any new operators.

Does this process call for much training of your internal staff or do you rely on supplier support too?

One of the ways we reduce costs at our plant is to train our employees to maintain and do minor repairs to their own equipment. We also have a full-time service tech on-staff for major repairs. We still have a lot of contact with our reps from the supply companies; however, we are already testing the waters with ordering B2B to reduce stock pull errors which account for over 70% of our missed deadlines.

You mentioned the volume of forms you print. Are you worried about a decrease in forms print demand?

There is still a high demand for carbonless forms; print-on-demand goes hand-in-hand with pay-on-receipt sales, but there is still a need for signature copies that establish accountability.

Will the IJFP also allow web based collaboration with your clients?

Part of the IJFP design is to eventually allow our clients to place their own orders over the Internet. This is critical to our expansion plans; by letting customers enter their own jobs we reduce the need to hire more customer service people while letting our current employees concentrate on quotes, questions, and follow-ups.

Give our print buying subscribers a few tips on buying smarter.

1) There are three facets to ordering printing: Price, Quality, and Speed. Pick two.

2) Don't pretend you know what you're talking about. Your printer can be a lot more help if he isn't trying to wean what you really want from what you think you want.

3) You will get a much better price/job from a printer by approaching him with the product idea and let him suggest specs that will give you the results you want and still work well with his equipment.