Southwest Offset Printing has transitioned into the heat-set market by adding facilities and staff while refining its operations.

With a family history in the printing business and a new, state-of-the-art facility, Southwest Offset Printing (SOP) is expanding its operations to take on high-profile clients. Based in Gardena, Calif., the company recently added a 50,000-square-foot facility to its seven-building campus and, in 1999, opened a location in Redwood City to better serve its clients in Northern California.

“I myself am a fourth-generation printer,” says COO and owner Jennifer McDonald. Her family got its start in the industry in 1916, when her great-grandfather, Harry McDonald ,cofounded Rodgers & McDonald Printing and Graphics. “Sixteen years ago, my father left that company and started Southwest Offset Printing,” she adds, referring to CEO Greg McDonald.

Initially, SOP was strictly a coldset printer. Coldset printing, used for newsprint, is a process in which ink is allowed to dry through evaporation and absorption. In 1997, SOP decided to branch out into heatset printing, a process used for magazine and glossy publications that uses heat to dry the ink. “In August, we launched our first heatset daily, The Hollywood Reporter,” McDonald notes.

Carving Out a Niche
The company also decided to focus on publications rather than relying on commercial print jobs. “What we decided to do was make a market niche for ourselves,” she explains. “With commercial printing, you have the peaks and valleys.”

Rather than taking on one-time print jobs and operating without a set schedule, SOP targeted daily, weekly and monthly publications, looking to operate as a timeshare. “At this point, we have 23 dailies,” McDonald notes, along with more than 70 weekly publications. “Whatever space is left over on the schedule, we fill in with commercial [jobs].”

SOP is willing to expand its operations to suit its customers’ needs. In 1999, the company added a second facility in Redwood City. “We [print] the London Financial Times, and they really needed a printer in Northern California,” she explains.

The 25,000-square-foot satellite facility is a coldset printer catering to dailies and weeklies, McDonald adds. “Everything is automated; it’s the newest technology,” she says.

In 2004, SOP launched an even bigger undertaking. The company successfully negotiated a contract with The New York Times and the Torrance Daily Breeze, along with several other publications owned by Copley Newspapers. Prior to the deal, the Daily Breeze provided printing for The New York Times.

In January 2005, SOP opened a 50,000-square-foot-building solely to handle the added workload from the two newspapers at its Gardena campus, which now totals more than 160,000 square feet. “It was a huge step,” McDonald says. “We literally doubled the work.”

Growing Pains
As it added to its workload, SOP also invested in new, state-of-the-art equipment, including presses, binding equipment and a polybagger to label and bag newspapers for delivery. “When you bring in the kind of work we did and add equipment like we did,” McDonald says, “you need labor.”

The company’s staff of 300 quickly grew to more than 550 as its list of clients grew, and it also acquired new buildings at its Gardena campus. Increased staff meant a need for intensive training and streamlining. The new presses also presented a challenge when it came to training staff. “We went from manually running the press to everything being done with the touch of a button,” she explains. “We had to train people to learn the digital side and allow the touch of a button to do what [they] used to do with [their] own hands.”

Dick Lopez, the company’s vice president of manufacturing, came on board in January, 2006. “The company is growing by leaps and bounds,” he says. “The most difficult component of growth is [establishing] the infrastructure to support the growth.”

SOP established procedures to streamline its operations and provide staff training. It began, Lopez says, by getting to know its equipment. That involved centerlining its presses, or setting them to the manufacturer’s specifications. “Then we profiled the equipment,” Lopez continues. “We tested different materials in the presses to determine what materials worked best for us. One we made those decisions, we [didn’t] change,” he says. The company established consistency by establishing rigid standard operating procedures – down to the quantities of ink that are used.

“We’ve established a very intensive training program with all the press crews,” Lopez adds. “We’ve proceduralized all components of the press.”

SOP also has a strict quality control policy and relies on in-house analysis as well as customer feedback to continually improve its service. “We do a postmortem on almost every job,” he explains. “We critique the job with the press crews and give instant feedback.”

McDonald says the company’s efforts to accommodate its growth have paid off. “We took the time to make sure we went through the transition,” she says. “You can’t grow too quickly,” McDonald adds, noting the company didn’t add buildings or equipment until the need was well established. “If there was enough of a demand for it, that’s when we brought it in.”

Continued Evolution
SOP continues to add to its offerings. The company now supports Web uploads, in addition to FTP transfers, which it introduced in 2000.

“The technological advancements in the pre-press area have allowed us to improve productivity through automation and a more efficient work flow,” McDonald says. “Once these files are submitted to SOP, they are automatically impositioned and plated for the press. What was once an eight-hour turnaround can now be achieved in less than an hour. That makes us so much more efficient.”

Despite its newly expanded facilities and state-of-the-art equipment, Lopez says, SOP is already planning for more growth. “We have a capacity issue, and these machines are less than 14 months old,” he explains.

“We feel comfortable enough to move forward and install another press,” adds McDonald, saying SOP will likely add another heatset press in the near future. “It [will give] us the heatset press capacity we need while increasing the redundancy in that department.”

McDonald says she is proud of her family’s legacy in the printing industry. “[We have] only 16 years under our belt,” she notes. “I’m proud because all of this was done by my father.”