“Blueprints: a dying industry?”

Article from the Daily Journal of Commerce Oregon – “the business of building”

“Blueprints: a dying industry?”

POSTED: Tuesday, May 22, 2012 at 01:55 PM PT

BY: Lee Fehrenbacher

Mike Amato’s office on Northwest Yeon Avenue tells a story about a long and active career. Statuettes from Greece, Italy and Israel sit next to volumes of photo albums documenting various travels. On the wall, a card with Muhammad Ali’s scribbled name sits next to a framed picture of the boxing legend, which Amato obtained shortly after encountering him in a Lloyd District hotel restroom many years ago.

Amato is proud of those stories, as he is of his work as CEO and founder of Willamette Print & Blueprint, a reprographics producer that specializes in construction plans.

“It’s fun watching these projects come together,” Amato said. “For instance, I did the west-side light rail – a huge project – and the second biggest tunnel project at the zoo. We did all that. It’s fascinating to be a part of the city growing. We’re there; we’re at the beginning.”

But that work and his various souvenirs now share a common quality: they are, increasingly, testaments to a bygone era.

As technology advances and contractors switch to digital plans and specifications, reprographics companies are taking revenue hits … and being forced to rethink their business models.

John Russo, owner of J2 Blueprint in Vancouver, Wash., said the industry has gone from a system of print and distribute to a new system of distribute and print.

“A mechanical contractor can go online and only print out the ‘M’ sheets, or an electrical contractor may only want the ‘E’ sheets. It used to be that all of that paper would go out and blanket everybody with the bid. Now, all the information is posted online for everyone’s access and if you want to print paper, do it yourself on your own damned device,” Russo said with a laugh. “It’s cut a big slice out of (our business).”

Russo remembers the first blue-page, white-line plans that gave blueprints their name in the 1950s. An ammonia-based process with diazo pages (light-sensitive opaque paper with a diazonium coating) followed in the 1960s.

“In those days you had architects drawing on a translucent piece of paper, and any areas not protected by the opaque lines from their pencil on the original … that area on that photo-sensitive material was lost,” he said. “That latent image remained and then it went through ammonia to develop your image and that’s where you got your blue line.”

Blueprint machines consumed a lot of space, and often required workers at multiple shops to work late nights to meet deadlines. Amato remembers when Reynolds High School went out to bid in the 1970s. The company sent out some 200 complete sets of drawings and specifications to contractors just for the bidding process.

But by the 1990s, contractors’ offices began to gain private printers with the ability to print out wide-format drawings. The final nail in the coffin arrived by 2005: online plan rooms.

The increasing use of design-bid processes and higher resolution plans (visible on smaller, half-size sheets) added to the demise of printing. Amato said his company nowadays is lucky if a job requires 12 complete sets.

“Where years ago we would do millions of square feet (of printing) in a given month, now as an industry we’re down more than half of that,” said Phil Guzie, co-owner and CEO of Precision Images, which has branches at Southeast Sandy Boulevard and Southwest Washington Street.

Guzie had to close facilities in Vancouver and Lake Oswego. He expects that when business picks up again, it will take place in space with half the square footage and require half the staff as before.

Today, reprographers manage, archive and disseminate plans as addendums, requests for information and change orders pop up. Neil Humphrey, president of Willamette Print & Blueprint, said the company manages about 1,000 jobs at any given time. Its plan room, which previously held rolls of blueprints, now houses server cabinets.

Jon Grasle, purchasing manager at Hoffman Construction, said the company formerly spent tens of thousands of dollars distributing plans for each job. Now it spends a fraction of that and instead relies on reprographers to manage the document flow.

American Reprographics Co. (formerly Ford Graphics in Portland) handles Hoffman’s invitation-to-bid system. ARC, one of the nation’s largest reprographers, at the end of the first quarter for 2012 posted net revenue of $103.5 million – a year-over-year decline of $2 million.

Guzie said management of the flow of information provides additional revenue, but not enough to replace printing losses. So he and his colleagues now sell or lease to contractors the very machines that once characterized their businesses.

“It’s like we’re selling them the gun to shoot us with,” Amato chuckled. “But if we don’t, someone else will.”

Companies are seeking color printing opportunities – posters, signs and billboards. However, Building Information Modeling systems and applications for viewing plans on handheld tablets still pose big question marks for the industry.

“I’m 48 years old and I love my iPad,” Guzie said, adding that new military-grade tablets will make paper drawings a hard sell. “I can’t blame the general contractors because it makes sense. So we’ll just have to figure out new revenue streams.”