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

In the quaint Hudson River Valley town of Saratoga Springs, NY, most everyone greets passersby with a hearty “How are you today?”

When catalogers make an on-press visit to the Quad/Graphics printing plant here, their experience fits with the bonhomie of the town.

After passing by the waving flags bearing the logos of the magazines and catalogs currently on press, the first person a visitor might see is plant manager Dick Marsel.

A veteran of the printing industry, Marsel has been in charge of the Saratoga facility since 1985. “I was one of the first plant managers at Quad/Graphics, so it was a learning experience,” he says.

Marsel oversees all of the plant’s operations, and splits his time between handling customer and employee issues.

Scheduling a Print Run

Marsel says a main part of his work is to monitor job flow, “to organize and keep the manufacturing flow going with the scheduling people and other people in the plant.”

But he also keeps in close contact with Quad’s other eight facilities on the frequent days when a catalog is being printed simultaneously at one of those sites and in Saratoga. “The plants are really connected at the hip when it comes to servicing our customers and maintaining our efficiency,” he says.

He says Quad hopes to develop a method to perform a “color OK” in one plant, send the color information across transmission lines hooked up to another plant, then lock the presses in and start running them in either facility or both: in short, “wherever the customer wants to be.”

Printer-Cataloger Relations

All of Quad’s customer service representatives (CSRs) report to Marsel. Each service rep at Quad has about five to 12 jobs going at once (a separate staff of four does the scheduling).

Part of the job of the CSR is to help clients understand the realities of manufacturing. Since clients range from art directors to production people to entrepreneurial catalogers who “do it all” for their catalogs, each comes with differing levels of experience with printing.

Some need to be informed, for instance, that inserts and blow-ins may only be used at form breaks.

Also, materials have to be on time now more than ever. “Years ago, in the film world, customers would bring materials in a day late. What we’d do to adjust for that is call in 10 or 15 [color separators] who were on their day off, and we’d throw a dozen people on the job, and turn it around and get it out on time,” Marsel recalls.

Since changing to a digital environment two and a half years ago, the scheduling is stricter. The digital workflow is calibrated exactly to the press runs. “We have buffers built in because we know people are not always on time, something can go wrong and we try to accommodate for that.” But the printer cannot jeopardize the “in-home” dates for clients that have materials in on time.

Side Benefit to Digital Workflow

“I would say the biggest change in technology in printing in the last three years is CTP, and the digital environment, which eliminated film,” says Marsel.

Besides allowing much more leeway for last-minute changes on press, a digital workflow also addresses another concern: confidentiality of materials. Though it’s an open plant for Quad’s customers, notes Marsel, “It’s all digital, it’s all kept under secure conditions in the imaging department; no other client can walk in and read [another’s] file.”

Before CTP, he says, printers were aware of the need for discretion because “it was BPs [blueprints], bluelines, color copies,” which could not be tracked as well. He credits Quad’s experience with working with weekly news magazines for the heightened awareness of this issue. “Security’s built in here,” he says.

Efficiency All Around

Asked about the concept of savings on printing for catalogers, Marsel responds, “Let’s see:Postage rates are going up, paper prices are going up …” plus, the costs of what printers are spending on technology are high. Is there a silver lining? “Where the savings come is in our ability to be more efficient, to get product out the door more quickly, which gets it into [our clients’] customers’ hands more quickly, which … allows more transactions.

“We can reduce cycle times in our facilities now, which allows our clients to do either more sale pages, or last-minute sale items. Because of the digital environment we can get [the job] done more easily, which gains [the customer] days on the front end to do a better job on marketing. I think that’s where the savings will come from.”

Just In Time/In and Out

Marsel explains that storage burdens at the plant have been greatly reduced by catalogers’ new practice of “just in time” production.

“We start printing the last form and it starts coming off the press, [and already] we’re starting up stitching; it’s almost like a weekly magazine—very tight production,” he says. “Years ago, we would have printed 16 million catalogs, bound a portion this month, put the rest in storage, and every month pulled a certain amount out. Today, because of marketing [changes] we don’t do that anymore. It’s print and bind, roll out.

“Now certain forms are printed to go out for the whole year; ones with leftover merchandise, et cetera, but the base book is printed, bound and shipped”—no hanging around. Product waits a maximum of six hours in the distribution room.

Changing Technologies

The oldest machines in the plant are four years old. Changes in equipment bring speed, increase the amount of pages output and improve the quality of product.

“We listen to our employees, take ideas from them, try to tweak and improve all the systems. Everything we have in our plant is in beta testing for improvement,” Marsel says.

Marsel cites automation as a main wave of innovation in the printing industry.

Materials handlers used to lift 40-pound logs of product at the plant; now the handling is automated, and deals in 200-pound units. Easier on the back!

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.”

People and Machines

Like the county it’s situated in, the Quad/Graphics Saratoga plant is growing fast.

Three buildings totalling 1.2 million square feet house 15 printing presses, up from 80,000 square feet when the facility opened in 1985. An 80,000 square-foot office complex is under construction, which will include a digital photography studio—all part of living up to the promise of being full service.

Customers have free range throughout the facility, which is truly giant. The paper/ink warehouse alone covers 300,000 square feet, with 28-foot ceilings. Four-thousand-pound rolls of paper are stacked five-high to the rafters, inducing a touch of dizziness. A dozen or more ink totes labeled “catalog” hold 500 pounds of ink each.

The churning of the presses makes for a very loud, warm environment on the pressroom floor, though big window panels and skylights give the plant an indoor-outdoor atmosphere.

A symphony of different bells, whistles and beeps fills the air. When the finger guard is taken off on a machine, an alarm sounds, Marsel explains. Each machine has its own distinct sound.

The rooms smell strongly of ink, and paper dust covers the steps that scaffold the presses.

At a company where every employee wears a blue uniform, a pressman with blond hair seems to be making a fashion statement with a lock of shocking pink over his right temple. Upon closer inspection: It’s ink.

The first pressman, leaning his weight to one side, appears to be perusing the catalog that’s being printed, doing a little shopping. He’s actually checking the registration on this form (a portion of the finished book).

The workers on press are trained to dialogue with visiting clients. They’ll just pop the earplugs out and confer with customers about registration or color.

Marsel points out that this customer contact makes the press workers’ jobs more interactive and therefore more interesting and rewarding.

Saddle-stitched and perfect-bound books have separate finishing rooms, where catalogs are bound, inkjetted, sorted by ZIP code and sent on to distribution.

At the last stage before they go out the door, skids of finished books are held in another vast warehouse, in 17,000 cells—in what’s called the VNA (very narrow aisle) racking system.

It’s all linear, this manufacturing process, all logically pointing toward the roughly 700 tractor-trailers that will take the catalogs into the postal stream.

Job Satisfaction

Marsel, taking stock of his three decades in printing, reflects on the best part of his work: “To see [that] new employees, and all employees, have the same opportunities that were given to me.”

Another gratifying part of printing magazines and catalogs is having a tangible end product to show for their work. “I can go back home to Wisconsin and visit my aunts and uncles and my mother, and see things there that we’ve been involved in producing.”

Printing 2001

Marsel notes the parallel between the Web and print, and the VCR and cinema: Contrary to predictions, the newer media did not result in the obsolescence of the older ones. In fact, Marsel says he has seen an upswing in the number of catalogs printed in the face of increased e-commercialization.