A Remarkable Expansion

It all started with a metal desk, a legal pad and an analog copier.

When Sherri Broderick began as the supervisor of Print/Mail/Sign Services for the Frisco Independent School District in 2002, the district had just 19 schools for the two-employee in-plant to service. But a population boom in the area over the last decade has expanded the district to 61 schools, with four more to be added in the fall of 2015.

Though this school district just north of Dallas is one of the nation's fastest growing districts, that growth has not been limited to the student population and number of schools. The in-plant has expanded as well, and now employs a staff of 16—a far cry from the small desk and meager array of equipment it started with.

The department was originally housed on one of Frisco's oldest campuses, in a room that was not properly equipped to handle the electrical and storage needs of a fully functional print shop. While there were certainly major operational challenges, one of Broderick's toughest tasks was establishing the shop and getting the district's employees to use it.

"The biggest challenge when it was so small was really trying to set in place the policies and procedures and how we were going to implement a print center," she recalls. "We just had the communications secretary printing a few copies for different people who requested them."

The in-plant remained in its original location for about two years, persevering through power outages and receiving paper without the benefit of a loading dock. But with the district's steady expansion, the shop got the green light to relocate to a larger space in a brand new high school.

While in the new location, Broderick says the in-plant was able to expand by adding the sign center, which produces banners and signs for the district on aluminum, Coroplast and PVC. But after a couple years, when it became clear that the district's growth was in no danger of slowing down, Print/Mail/Sign Services was ready to move again.

Broderick says she was hoping for a destination that would be a permanent home for the department, and was able to find that in the district's Career and Technical Education Center, which opened in 2008, where the in-plant now resides in a 8,387-square-foot facility with a 4,013-square-foot Print Center Warehouse. Now, Broderick says students moving throughout the school during the day no longer impact the department, and with a loading dock in the new location, paper deliveries are not an issue.

Volumes Through the Roof

In 2012 though, the in-plant found itself with a tremendous increase in volume—and it wasn't entirely because of an increase in students. The decision was made to remove the Xerox copiers that faculty and staff had been using as walk-up work centers. They were replaced with Lexmark machines that could not handle the same capacity. This led to a drastic increase in volume at the in-plant.

"The summer before school started, we couldn't even sit still," Broderick recalls. "We didn't even have enough people to answer the phone. So many teachers had never been challenged to use the print center because they never really had to. Now they were pushing the volume over here with things that they could do before that now they couldn't really do."

Luckily for the in-plant, it had implemented a Web-to-print solution the year before, WebCRD, from Rochester Software Associates. Broderick says it took about a year to spread the word that the district was moving away from the traditional hard copy job submission forms to the Web-to-print platform, and the process wasn't easy. But now that the entire district is on board with WebCRD, the in-plant can better handle the immense volume, and the job submission procedure is far more convenient for faculty, staff and other school-related organizations.

In a district the size of Frisco, which currently serves more than 49,000 students, Broderick knew it would be essential to make the transition to Web-to-print as seamless as possible. She and her staff developed a district-wide marketing campaign to spread the word about WebCRD.

Broderick began by placing a sticker on every hard copy job submission ticket explaining the change and providing the website. The in-plant hosted open houses and gave away free copy offers. A district-wide email blast contained additional information that the change was coming. Faculty and staff were invited to training sessions over the summer.

"It was a gradual process," Broderick explains. "We kind of transitioned them into that aspect of it. We brought it to their attention by training. We basically gave them a good grace period, but by that time it was, 'That's it; this is what we're doing.'"

The campaign was such a success that Rochester Software Associates awarded the in-plant with multiple awards in an in-plant marketing contest. The department was named the overall winner and the most creative.

Since the in-plant has implemented WebCRD, Broderick says her shop's efficiency has improved significantly. Through calculations she and the district's Xerox representative compiled at the time, Broderick found Print/Mail/Sign Services has cut down on approximately 40 hours per week through instituting the software and developing a more automated workflow.

"We were calculating the cost manually," Broderick says. "We were Xeroxing tickets so I could go back and manually key these costs in per campus. Now it's just a click of a button and pulling reports from a date to a date … and it pulls up in five to 10 minutes. I have everything calculated. I have the impressions that we did. We have the person who placed the order. We have the completion time and date. We have the cost we are bringing back in revenue."

Though the Web-to-print system has been a major benefit to the success of Print/Mail/Sign Services, Broderick has implemented additional strategies to ensure the in-plant is best serving the expansive school district.

Bins and Barcodes

With so many campuses to serve, Broderick says the in-plant was faced with a major challenge in making sure all of the right jobs were being sent to the correct destinations. To ensure that there would be minimal delivery mix-ups, a system of bins and barcodes was implemented, reducing the potential for missed deliveries. The effort not only removes frustration for the customer, but also saves the print shop from having to redo a costly job.

"Once we process the orders and they go in the bins, then we're double checking them one more time before they go out the door," Broderick explains. "That's been really helpful too because we can check ourselves. We try to make them work on one campus at a time so they don't get them mixed up."

As the Frisco school district continues its rapid growth, Print/Mail/Sign Services intends to evolve to serve its needs. Broderick says new Ford Transit vans will soon replace the big box trucks the department currently uses, which will allow for more efficiency.

Print/Mail/Sign Services has come a long way from the days of two employees running black-and-white impressions. Broderick says the first years of major growth were hard, but with her staff's positive attitude and dedication to being an asset for the district, future challenges will be met head on.

"It was a huge challenge and I'm glad all that is behind us," she says.