A Wider World for George Fox

When he started working at George Fox University Print Services in 2011, Richard Silver was no stranger to wide-format printing. He had previously worked at a reprographics company specializing in wide-format.

“I learned how to be able to open up, tear apart and put back together plotters,” says Silver, manager of the Newberg, Ore., in-plant.

So when he learned that the Christian university was outsourcing all of its wide-format jobs, Silver saw a big opportunity.

“We could have this [service] here,” mused Silver, “and we could…provide a quicker turnaround time for our students and our staff who are ordering posters.”

In July, that dream came true when the in-plant installed an eight-color, 44˝ Canon imagePROGRAF iPF8300S inkjet printer and hit the ground running. In its first two months of operation, the wide-format printer cranked out 45 posters, Silver says, adding to an already busy summer for the operation.

“Over the past two years, our production has increased so much that this summer none of our equipment has sat idle for too long,” Silver reveals.

To bring about this business boom, Silver has been meeting frequently with department heads, assistant administrators and other key decision makers on campus to ask them how the in-plant can better assist them. His enthusiasm has encouraged more customers to give the in-plant a try. The new wide-format printer has only expanded this business.

Since adding the Canon iPF8300S, the in-plant—which employs two full-timers and four students—has been busy producing student posters for the colleges of business, engineering and nursing, none of which were customers before the plotter arrived. Silver says that once he shows departments samples of the various media the printer can print on—such as Tyvec, vinyl, canvas or window clings—their minds go to work and they come up with ideas they hadn’t considered previously.

“The array of different types of media that we can print on, that in itself is a great opportunity to sell the product,” he notes. To further increase business, Silver also plans to give presentations to classes with design and formatting tips for their poster projects.

The Canon iPF8300S isn’t the only thing new at University Print Services. The shop also just added a new Neopost DS-200 folder/inserter and a Neopost AS-950C addresser, which uses Memjet technology to offer full-bleed printing.

“Our demand for folding and inserting for bulk mailing was increasing,” Silver explains. The shop’s previous inserter was not up to the task, and the in-plant was losing business, he says. Financial Services, for example, recently had a 13,000-piece folding and inserting job that the in-plant was unable to handle.

“Their whole department had to spend a good portion of their day folding and inserting manually, because our [inserter] just wasn’t able to keep up” he notes. “This unit will be able to do all the things that the department needed us to do in a fraction of the time”—letting departments focus on their own jobs.

The new Neopost AS-950C addresser is a vast improvement over the previous “primitive” model, Silver says, which jammed repeatedly, forcing the in-plant to reprint ruined material.

“We needed something that was quicker, efficient and more reliable,” he says. And those three words, in essence, also sum up the advantages this newly upgraded in-plant is bringing to George Fox University.