‘Copy Shop’ Transforms Into Production Color Print Operation

When Wesley Grigg started as manager of Elon University Printing Services a year and a half ago, the three-employee in-plant wasn’t exactly viewed by university departments as a provider of top quality printing.

“This was pretty much just a copy shop,” confesses Grigg. Having shed its offset presses a year before his arrival, the Elon, N.C.-based in-plant specialized in black-and-white copies. And though it had an Ikon CPP 500 color printer, the shop charged so much for color that most people went to local quick printers instead, he says.

For Grigg, who had 20 years of printing experience under his belt, this was not acceptable.

“I wanted to do color,” he declares.

So when the lease on the CPP 500 was nearing its end, he took action.

“The first thing I looked at was how much was being spent off campus,” he says. He found that close to $1 million a year was going to outside shops.

“My goal was to get as much of that back on campus as possible,” he says.

To do that, he knew he needed a much more robust color device. So he looked at printers from Xerox, HP, Canon and Konica Minolta, finally narrowing it down to either a Xerox 700 or a Ricoh Pro C900. In the end, Ricoh won out. In September, the in-plant installed the 90-page-per-minute, 1,200x1,200-dpi digital color production system.

“I’m very impressed with the registration, front to back,” he remarks. And perhaps most importantly: “We’re able to hit our school colors now. We were unable to do that before.”

This kept the shop from doing a lot of university work in the past—work that has now started flowing in. In fact, one big feather in Grigg’s cap was being trusted to print the Elon Annual Report, a job that was always sent off campus to get the highest quality results.

“We were able to produce this job at a fraction of the cost, and they were very pleased with the quality, to say the least,” Grigg reports.

The in-plant’s biggest customer is now Elon’s Athletics department. The Ricoh Pro C900 prints all the department’s business cards, flyers, post cards, membership mailings—everything but the football programs, though Grigg adds, “I expect to get the football programs next year, as they have been very, very, pleased with everything we do for them.”

Since adding the Pro C900, color volumes have grown dramatically, Grigg says. Where in the past the in-plant averaged less than 10,000 color clicks per month, he says, those volumes have now septupled; in October the shop cranked out 71,000 color impressions.

“So you can see what a difference it has made,” he says.

Black-and-white printing, on the other hand, has been on the decline, leaving the shop’s two Canon 7110s often underworked.

“Our black-and-white volume was down so far that I needed to find some way to get out of the contract,” Grigg says. Fortunately, since the contract was done through Ikon, and Ricoh now owns Ikon, he was able to work out a great deal. As part of the Pro C900 agreement, Ikon removed one of the 7110s.

“We’re actually paying less per month now,” Grigg reports—paying less and doing more. Even University Relations has started letting the in-plant quote on most of its jobs.

“While we don’t always get every job, we are doing a lot more,” Grigg says.