Houston Independent School District Printing Services has brought innovative changes to the nation’s seventh-largest school system.

By Patrick Henry

Challenging FMs On Their Own Turf

Houston Independent School District (HISD) Printing Services is putting its expertise to use outside the walls of its school district by offering facilities management (FM) services. The in-plant has been running printing facilities for other organizations for about two years now. For example, it handles printing for the City of Houston out of a three-employee shop in City Hall.

Facilities management presently accounts for around 5 percent of the shop’s overall income, says Charlotte Holden, director of Administrative Services. Holden expects to see FM’s share “creeping up to 10 percent” as word spreads of the department’s expertise in running printing facilities other than its own.

“We’re getting a name in doing FM for educational and government facilities,” she says, although she’s well aware that in this venture, the department is treading on the turf of the industry’s biggest FM service providers: Xerox, Océ, Pitney Bowes and Ikon Office Solutions (now part of Ricoh). Holden acknowledges that it’s a “David and Goliath model,” but she’s confident in the department’s ability to stand tall in its own way as an FM service provider. She says that besides being competitive in price and quality of service, her team knows how to turn its resources into solutions that the big players can’t match.

Holden hopes that one such idea will cause Houston’s Lone Star College System to select the department’s bid to manage its copy center—an assignment that all of the big FM service providers also are vying for. In its response to the RFP, the department offers to do not only the copy center’s printing but its mailing as well, the latter at a postage discount of $.01 per piece.

The department can do this by passing through some of the savings it will earn by adding the copy center’s mail to the volume it already sends to the mailing service it uses. The more pieces, the bigger the discount for sortation by ZIP code, and the sweeter the offer to the college. Holden will know in September whether David has upset Goliath once more.

PROVIDING SERVICES of any kind to the Houston Independent School District (HISD) means thinking big—there's simply no other way to approach the task.

Educating more than 220,000 students in a 301-square-mile network of elementary, middle and high schools, HISD is the seventh-largest public school system in the nation and the largest in Texas. With an annual budget in excess of $1.6 billion and a work force of more than 28,000 full- and part-time employees, HISD is a producer and a consumer of services on a truly Texas-sized scale.