Features

In Jo Pitt's line of work, jobs have got to be delivered on time, even when unforeseen events throw a spanner in the works. So, when her print partner, which had seemingly covered all the bases in terms of contingency planning, was struck by a burst water main - the one thing that companies cannot predict - her team were immediately placed on standby. Thankfully, on this occasion, it was a false alarm. The printer managed to get the water board to fix it in double-quick time, ensuring the work was completed on schedule and was never in any real danger of failing.

In her role as head of the print services team at the House of Commons – which has her managing Parliament’s in-house production department, as well as outsourcing jobs to external suppliers – Pitt can’t allow work to get to the point of failure. Indeed, she has so many contingency plans in place that it would never get close to that stage.

The right experience
It’s a far cry from her first job working for an agency in High Wycombe. She then took up the post of print buyer at GlaxoSmithKline and later became a print manager at the Department for Transport. Here she set up the procurement team, as well as putting in place the department’s framework arrangements through an EU tender.

This experience stood her in good stead for when she took on her current role in 1998. Initially, her main responsibility was preparing and managing the EU tender process for Parliament’s printing. She was then able to focus on the management of the print services department, which was created in 1994.

The House authorities created the in-house facility due to concerns about business continuity. In the first six months following its creation, the facility, manned by three production staff, ran just 167 jobs. In the last year alone, 8,169 jobs were produced, totalling 9,918,277 printed sides, achieving an overall estimated saving against commercial rates of £548,000.

Pitt oversees a 10-strong team across two sites, with shifts covering 7.30am to midnight, Monday to Friday.

Unique demands
The demands on the division are unheard of in the commercial sector. It’s rare that more than two days notice is given for jobs; indeed, the team is regularly required to turn around work in less than half an hour. Priority is always given to procedural work, regardless of the order in which the jobs were received, making production planning difficult, if not impossible.

Our primary role is to ensure that the chamber never fails to get papers, no matter what happens in the rest of the world, explains Pitt. When a bill is travelling back and forwards between chambers [House of Lords and the House of Commons], they have to stop proceedings to take on board amend­ments, so urgent printing is required.

The secondary role of the print services team is to do what Pitt describes as administrative printing for the House, which includes anything from posters to multilingual visitor information.

Much of this is printed digitally on the in-house plant’s impressive line-up of modern kit, which includes Xerox, Riso and Canon machines. In addition, the facility has a wide range of finishing capabilities covering folding, stitching, creasing, booklet making and wire binding.

Anything that cannot be dealt with internally goes to one of the printers on the House’s framework arrangement. We don’t try and produce material in-house for the sake of it, she explains. If it’s too large a quantity or offset colour work, then it goes out.

Last year, 154 print jobs were outsourced at a cost of £117,558. Not a huge amount compared to the number of pages that we handle in print services during a year, says Pitt. The team has an Accura MIS, which means that an assessment can be made very quickly as to the most cost-effective way of producing a job.

The suppliers on the framework arrangements cover a range of specialisms, from label printing through to large-format work, and provide a good geographic spread spanning the length and breadth of the country. Unfortunately, she says that some excellent suppliers have fallen by the wayside over the years because they failed to follow the stringent guidelines for print tendering. We’ve lost some good printers in the past because they have been lax at filling in tendering paperwork, explains Pitt.

She adds that everyone involved in procurement in the House is aware of the need to be extremely diligent when it comes to adhering to EU rules. However, she is more than happy to talk to printers and offer them advice about the tendering process. Within the rules, we try to help them and give them encouragement, but once an EU tender is underway, we are bound by strict rules.

Unsurprisingly, a lot of companies bid for the House’s work due to the kudos attached, although Pitt is quick to point out that they’re not necessarily big-volume or high-value jobs. On an annual basis, she reviews the performance of the companies in the framework arrangements. She writes letters to each of them outlining how she sees their performance over the past 12 months. I tell them how many quotes we believe they have produced and how many they have converted. I also feed back to them whether or not we’re happy or unhappy with their service. It gives me a chance to thank them for good service or possibly ask them to sharpen their pencil.

Geographic spread
I believe that it’s good that our suppliers are based all over the country, she continued. This wasn’t a deliberate move. It boiled down to who got the highest score overall and distance was not a factor. We advertised in the EU Journal so conceivably if a printer in France, or anywhere else for that matter, thought they could meet the requirements then we would have considered them without bias – but none applied.

And the good news for UK printers is that the House will continue to commission printed jobs over the coming years because, while the print services team use electronic data capture and delivery wherever possible, the way that the day-to-day business of the House is conducted has changed little since its creation and still relies on printed pages.

At the moment, the written word is the legal entity in this country, explains Pitt. We have records going back 1,000 years so it would need to be guaran­teed that something produced today on a different format could still be read in 50 years, let alone 1,000 years, for a total move to alternative formats.

So for the foreseeable future, Pitt’s team is geared up to cope with the House’s insatiable demand for last-minute printed products – and to hopefully shave a few seconds off its current 12-minute personal best.