Jim O'Keefe examining R.S. Knapp's Gerber Photo Plotter
Editor’s Note: Long-time IRgA member R.S. Knapp (aka Napco) turns 80 years old this year. In honor of that milestone, we are publishing a three-part first-person interview with Mike O’Keefe, president of the company. This part explores the technology that the company has succeeded with over the years. Click here to read Part 1, which lays out the basic business growth; and click here to read Part 3, which looks at the O’Keefe family and their involvement with IRgA.
My dad, Jim O’Keefe, was always focused on the changing technology.
For example, he opened a pen plotting service in the 1970s because people couldn’t print out their CAD drawings and they didn’t want to buy a $20,000 pen plotter themselves. But those of us who have been around remember how slow that was. The problem with pen plotters was you had to babysit them because if you were plotting something that was going to take 45 minutes, which was common, you had to make sure that the pens didn’t clog up, because if they did, you basically had to do it all over again.
Then Mutoh approached us with their pencil plotter. Now you don’t have to worry about the pen skipping because it got clogged up because it’s using pencil instead. The pencil plotter could produce in 10 or 15 minutes what might take 45 minutes on your pen plotter, because you could run the machine much faster.
In the mid ‘80s, he spent $1.2 million on a Gerber photo plotter, which nobody had ever heard of. It would draw with light on film, and the benefit was to the printed circuit industry. Back then they would use Bishop tape to create these printed circuits, and it would be at a 4x scale, and then you’d bring it into the photo department and reduce it to 25% so that the error accuracy was reduced by that much. But with the Gerber you could print the film used to make the circuit boards directly with no intermediary steps.
So he saw the opportunity, and it was probably the single biggest investment he had made up to that time on a piece of equipment. At that time, we were doing a lot of work for the defense industry, which was pretty prevalent at the time in the Northeast, especially out on Long Island. We were the only people on the whole Eastern seaboard who had this device. We were sitting right in the middle of a gold mine.
We probably ran that machine 20 hours a day for five or six days a week. I was the one running it, and I used to sleep in the conference room on the table, and we had a buzzer that would go off when it finished printing to wake me up and change film to start the next one to print.
It was slow as molasses, but we charged by the hour. I think we charged $85 an hour. We ran that for maybe seven or eight years, until they came out with a laser photo plotter that could produce the same thing within five minutes. But while we were running the Gerber, it was so profitable that it helped fund some of our investments into other technologies.
My dad’s philosophy on equipment was if something comes out that’s useful to our customers and it costs a lot of money, that’s a good thing for us, because we can offer it as a service. But we learned that eventually technology is going to come down in price and people will be able to buy it themselves. That opened up the door for us selling equipment.
For instance, as the photo plotter was nearing the end of its economic life, Xerox came out with the 2510. At the time we had been selling blueprint machines with reasonable success, but when the 2510 came out, everything changed. We sold thousands.
When the 3060 came out, which was a roll-fed machine with reduction and enlargement capabilities, it was like a $60,000 machine, I believe. He wanted to sell as many of those as he sold of 2510s, which cost $10,000. But he knew that most people were not going to shell out $60,000.
So my dad, again, being very entrepreneurial, told people, “Don’t buy it. Here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going give you this machine and you pay me for the prints that come out of it.”
His plan was to basically eliminate the objection of cost and allow them to pay for the machine by using it. That was a very profitable business. It’s kind of funny, he used to call the system “PFO,” and nobody ever knew what PFO meant. So one day I asked him what it meant, and he said, “Well, you know, we had to shell out a lot of money for this very expensive equipment. We have to make sure we’re getting our money back, so PFO stands for ‘Pray for O'Keefe,’ because if something goes wrong, we’re screwed!”
That put us on an equipment path that was kind of mind boggling when you think about where my dad came from. And when things went digital, it allowed us to basically keep the same thought process. The cost of the equipment does not need to impede us placing these machines out in the field.
And it worked. We were always in the top 10 Xerox resellers for wide format and always in the top 10 resellers for Océ when they came out with the 9400. And that continued with HP when we took on HP.
Speaking of digital, as soon as things started going digital, we kind of realized that we needed to be more efficient in the way we were handling documents. And so we developed a system where customers could bring in their plans, we would scan them and put them in a database, very similar to what you see online now, but this was all internal. And if a sheet needed to get updated, we had some automation built in to take out sheet one and replace it with the new one and notify everybody that it had been done.
We’ve come a long way in digital document management since then. My brother Kevin developed the product we call Closeout, which helps construction people keep their documentation organized so that at the end of a job the general contractor can quickly turn over his closeout package to the owner (see the image below this article). Until he does that, he’s missing anywhere between 10% and 20% of his final payments. So the quicker he can get that to his customer, the quicker he gets paid.
It’s a nightmarish process our customers go through trying to prepare their documents. Usually it’s at the end of the job and somebody says, “Oh crap, we gotta organize all this stuff.” One of the reasons why this thing was put together was because a GC came to us saying, “This guy is literally crying and he wants to quit because he can’t handle all this information and put a building up at the same time.”
So we gave them a digital methodology to keep it all in place throughout the course of the job and at the end of the job when they’re ready for closeout, basically they push a button. We introduced Closeout in 2016.
Our FBI division – Forensic Building Information -- is certainly the hottest item now. That department offers the latest technology for jobsites, such as LiDAR scanning and ground-penetrating radar.
Years ago we could get customers’ attention by educating them about something new, like an 8830 or a pencil plotter, and showing them how it can improve their workflow. Well, fast forward 20 years and everybody just assumes I click a button and a pretty picture comes out. I don’t really need somebody to educate me. So if you go in to talk to a customer about printing, they’re not that interested.
But when we go in to talk about things like LiDAR scanning and ground-penetrating radar and closeout management, those are things people want to be educated about. So when we knock on their door, they want to hear what we have to say about those topics, and it gives us an opportunity to make sure they understand all the other things we do.
So we’re carrying on the technology legacy my dad started. He was always focused on making sure we found a way to take advantage of technology.
One more example: I remember when I first started working here in the late ‘80s, my dad kept talking about the printer-plotter-copier. At the time, nothing of the sort existed. He always said, “Somebody’s going to come out with the printer-plotter-copier and we have to be there.” And sure enough, he was right. Xerox came out with the 8830 and then Océ had their 9800. It’s amazing how somebody from my dad’s generation had the foresight and the intelligence to recognize how technology was going to change.
Stay tuned for the rest of the story:
Part 3: The Family Behind R.S. Knapp and their Involvement with IRgA (April 17)
Click here to read Part 1, which lays out the basic business growth
