To remain in the space, the department’s offset-printing division would have needed to start paying rent of $15,000 a month beginning in May.ĭuring its tenure, UC Printing has served hundreds of customers and filled thousands of orders. To compound matters, the university’s sale of the Marchant Building recently became finalized. The unit’s bottom line tells the story: In fiscal year 2009 the business earned $7 million in FY 2010 its projected revenue was $3.5 million. In the past year, campus departments have cut their costs by partly forgoing print, instead making 10-15 percent of their documents available online or creating downloadable PDFs.

Fifty UN delegates signed the founding document at the San Francisco War Memorial and Performing Arts Center.Ĭoley stated the case for closing UC Printing in a campus document that reflects a shift away from print. Its proudest moment came in 1945, when UCPS printed the United Nations Charter in 50 languages.

Since it started in 1874, UC Printing Services has helped meet the graphic arts, marketing, and communication needs of the university, affiliated units, and other state-funded California agencies. Such an outpouring should come as no surprise. “This place was a huge part of my life for 15 years and the group of people I worked with every bit a part of my family,” says Rob Burgess, a shift lead at UCPS.īecause Berkeley units could avoid requests for proposals and sales tax on jobs they shopped out to the campus printer, UCPS was “very competitive” and “the vendor of choice,” says Coley, who has received letters of condolence and concern about the printing unit’s closure from many of its campus patrons. From inception to delivery, print is expensive.”Īlthough print is inarguably expensive, the human costs of closing the plant are likely to be incalculable to the unit’s employees. Part of the problem, says Abrahimi, is that “when the campus goes through a funding crisis, the first thing that gets cut is advertising, communications, and marketing. “Though it’s been a heroic effort,” he adds, “it’s not enough.” Most printers, he says, would be happy with an error rate between 2 to 4 percent. Thanks to his staff’s willingness to make changes, UC Printing’s error rate is below 1 percent, the lowest in the industry, says Abrahimi. Five years ago, the campus’s printing unit implemented so-called lean manufacturing, a production process designed to cut costs by reducing standing inventory and increasing efficiency. “We did everything possible to prevent this and then some,” says Haron Abrahimi, UC Printing’s director since 2004. UC Printing director Haron Abrahimi (Wendy Edelstein / NewsCenter photo) Over the past four years, the unit has struggled to streamline its operations, but its efforts were no match for increasing expenses, declining revenues, and the current budget crisis. Its main facility in the Marchant Building at 1100 67th St., a satellite facility in University Hall, and the Copy Center at UC Office of the President will all close. During the next six weeks, the campus vendor will phase out its business. UC Printing Services “can no longer sustain current operations,” wrote Coley in an April 7 CalMessage. “I was committed to finding any way possible to save this longstanding institution,” says Ron Coley, associate vice chancellor for business and administrative services. It will also mark the end of a 136-year-old Berkeley institution, one that printed the UN charter in 1945 and has produced many signature publications, among them the campus directory, general catalog, student handbook, and annual calendar. The form of the metal determined the components’ final function - thin wires as resistors, flat plates as capacitors, spiral coils as inductors - all on a scale small enough to hide inside a milk cap.When UC Printing closes its doors next month, it won’t just mean the end of the line for 40 employees, some of whom have worked at the unit for 20 years. The researchers solved this problem by building solid shapes of plastic and wax, removing the wax, and injecting silver into the voids left behind. While plastic polymers offer flexibility and precision as building blocks of miniature and one-off objects, they don’t conduct electricity. Granted, 3-D printers can’t do all the work themselves. Mechanical engineering professor Liwei Lin led a team to demonstrate the potential of 3-D printers to produce not only standard components like resistors, inductors and capacitors, but also custom devices for specific applications - in this test case, a novel wireless sensor integrated into a milk-carton cap to detect spoilage. Makers and tinkerers may soon have a new source of electronic components: their personal 3-D printer. This article appeared in Berkeley Engineer magazine, Fall 2015

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