Day with a Pro: Dick Marsel, Printing Manager, Quad/Graphics

More than 200 people worked in the imaging department when the plant depended more on film. Since going digital two and a half years ago, the department uses only 35 people. Marsel explains that many of the workers have shifted from color stripping to the customer-service side.

For comparison, newspaper printers are almost fully automated because of the uniformity of product, whereas “In our print facility, we do everything from the larger size, which is 9˝x103⁄4˝, down to slim-jim, which is 51⁄4˝x77⁄8,˝, and everything in between. You’d have to design a robotic system that could adjust to all those sizes. That’s why we’re not fully automated yet, because that type of system has not been designed. We’re close to it, though.”