Allegheny College Printing Services installed an IKON CPP 500 with a bookletmaker and a CPP 650 with a folder and stapler.

Meeting the printing needs of a 2,100-student liberal arts college is tough enough with just three employees. But when your main digital color printer can’t keep up with the growing volume of work—and you still have two years left on the lease—it’s time to take serious action.

After shutting down its offset presses for good last June and putting its trust in its Canon CLC 4000, Allegheny College Printing Services, in Meadville, Pa., saw volume on the machine skyrocket. Clicks jumped from 19,000 to more than 40,000 a month. Unfortunately, the number of service calls grew as well.

So Manager Mark Pritchard talked with his dealer (IKON) and negotiated an exchange: he traded the 4000 for two color printers: an IKON CPP 500 with a bookletmaker and a CPP 650 with a folder and stapler.

“For what we were leasing the CLC 4000 for, we could have two machines,” he says—and the lease payment was still lower.

The two new printers will not only let the shop provide better quality work and faster turnarounds, they will ensure that at least one color printer is always available. And as a bonus, the CPP 650’s folder can be put to use when the shop’s Baum 2015 is busy. The in-plant also has a Standard Horizon10-bin collator with a stitcher/folder/trimmer.

In addition to its color printers, the in-plant has Canon imageRUNNER 8500 and 105 black-and-white printers and an HP 500ps wide-format ink-jet printer for printing posters.

“It’s a real good business for us,” Pritchard says of poster printing. Posters are laminated with a ProSEAL 44.

In the future, Pritchard plans to use the shop’s digital printers to provide variable data printing.

—By Bob Neubauer