Highlight Color Thriving at School District In-plant

By Bob Neubauer

Copy Center Lets Teachers Teach

In the mid-’90s, Parma City School District decided to address a growing problem. Teachers at the Ohio district’s 20 schools were spending a lot of time copying their own classroom materials on walk-up copiers. Lots of paper was being wasted when they made mistakes, and machines were getting burned out from printing high-volume projects.

So the district asked its in-plant to set up a copy center. Now, longer-run projects are required to be sent to the copy center for 24-hour turnaround on the center’s six Xerox 4595s. This lets teachers spend more time in their classrooms.

“If they need 100 copies of seven pages, rather than them standing in front of a copier that they’re going to burn up, because it can’t handle that kind of volume, they’re sending it here to our high-speed copiers,” explains Ray Sposet, community outreach specialist. “It means fewer copiers in the buildings. It means fewer damages to those copiers.”

Sposet says there may have been some push-back from teachers in the early days, but by now they see the benefits of this system.

“Teachers love it,” he contends. The copy center now receives about 55,000 teacher requests a year.

A FEW years back, Parma City School District's in-plant faced a dilemma. The 13,000-student district, just south of Cleveland, wanted spot color on some of its documents, but the in-plant's equipment could not cost effectively provide it. Its Xerox DocuColor 8000 was up to the task, but page costs for spot color would be high. Likewise, inking up the shop's two-color presses would be expensive for short runs.

"We wanted to offer something in between," remarks Dan Salloum, Production Printing foreman.

So in 2007, the six-employee in-plant added a Xerox DocuTech 180 HighLight Color (HLC) system. The machine was immediately busy, and the district found more and more uses for it. Documents that had always been black and white were given highlight color makeovers. Business picked up so much that, in November 2008, the shop added a second DocuTech 180 HLC.

Today, the in-plant uses the two machines not only for two-color printing but for all of its black-only digital printing as well. Printing costs on black-only documents are the same as they were on the DocuTech 6115 that the shop previously used. Two-color jobs cost about one-third of a cent more than black-only jobs and five times less than full color.

The district uses highlight color to emphasize key parts of documents. For example, a postcard on new rules about student attire called out the changes with green type.

"You can really get your point across with highlight color," remarks Salloum.

Also, commencement programs and other documents for the district's three high schools can now include each school's colors.

Some jobs have been moved off the shop's Itek and Ryobi presses and onto the 180 HLCs, notes Ray Sposet, community outreach specialist.

"Letterhead had always gone on the presses before," he says. "Now we can put that on the two-color [HLC printers]."

Because stationery and business cards can now be printed in one pass, the in-plant no longer has to preprint and warehouse these items, saving some $50,000 a year. (With the additional storage space, Parma purchases paper at a significant large-quantity discount.)

The in-plant uses the Xerox FreeFlow make–ready system to create, store and submit files to its digital printers. The DocuTech 180 HLC printers produce two-color pages at 180 pages per minute with resolutions of 600x2,400 dots per inch (dpi) in black and 600x600 dpi in highlight color. Interposer trays allow the shop to insert color pages produced on the DocuColor 8000. Inline tape binding and stapling enables the systems to produce finished books, such as the district's comprehensive annual financial reports.

Nearly 30 Million Pages a Year

In recent years, the in-plant has seen print volumes increase by 30 percent; the shop now produces nearly 30 million pages a year. One reason has been a change in government policies regarding state-required achievement tests. The state now charges districts for the printed tests, so Parma has elected to download them and print them itself.

Other items the in-plant produces include school newspapers, post cards, forms, sports programs, buttons and ID badges. The shop has a graphics department, where its HP and Canon wide-format printers produce posters, signs and banners for school events. It also has laser engraving capabilities for creating plaques.

In addition to its main production operation—which houses the Xerox equipment, plus four presses and a JetPlate 4880 computer-to-plate system—the in-plant oversees a separate copy center to produce curriculum materials for teachers (see sidebar).

The in-plant also handles scanning and archiving of district documents, such as old purchase orders, personnel files and blueprints. The shop uses a Vidar Atlas P42 wide-format color scanner for large documents and scans anything 11x17˝ and smaller using the Xerox 4595s in the copy center. Whenever the machines aren't busy printing, Salloum says, staff uses them to scan. Then the shop shreds the hard copy versions.

"We have so many boxes and boxes of records," he says. "I don't think we'll ever see the end of that."

In addition to providing all these services, the in-plant's six employees handle pickup and delivery of mail, printing and even audio-visual equipment to and from 21 locations. All of these responsibilities make for a very busy staff, Salloum says. He's proud of their ability to multi-task and get it all done.

"I do have a very good work force," he lauds. IPG

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Bob Neubauer Author's page

Bob has served as editor of In-plant Impressions since October of 1994. Prior to that he served for three years as managing editor of Printing Impressions, a commercial printing publication. Mr. Neubauer is very active in the U.S. in-plant industry. He attends all the major in-plant conferences and has visited more than 180 in-plant operations around the world. He has given presentations to numerous in-plant groups in the U.S., Canada and Australia, including the Association of College and University Printers and the In-plant Printing and Mailing Association. He also coordinates the annual In-Print contest, co-sponsored by IPMA and In-plant Impressions.