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.”
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