Ithaca’s Digital Shift

WAYNE FRENCH didn't need a crystal ball to see what was coming. With two Shinohara presses, his in-plant at Ithaca College was proficient at churning out long runs of materials for the 119-year-old private school. The trouble was, these pieces were largely being warehoused, where many became outdated before they could be used.

French, director of the Center for Print Production at the Ithaca, N.Y.-based college, knew that short-run, on-demand digital printing was the answer. It could reduce this obsolescence and waste, and offer personalization to boot. But he needed to make some major changes first, both to his seven-employee shop and to his customers' ordering habits.

"We needed to help our customers be smarter about buying printing," says French. "And we needed to do it in a way that would keep costs down, quality up and turnaround as quick as possible."

So about six years ago, the department made its first foray into digital color printing. It added an HP Indigo 3050. This was a great start, and got the in-plant into the short-run color business, but within a year, problems began to emerge.

"I really liked the Indigo, but we spent a lot of time doing maintenance on the press," he says. What's more, the lack of inline finishing capabilities was slowing down the production of booklets, one of the shop's main products.

So the Center for Print Production installed a second digital color press, this time a Xerox iGen3 with a Polockmatic bookletmaker on the back end. Armed with these two digital devices, the in-plant was finally able to move completely away from offset printing.

Just a year later, the shop replaced the 3050 with a second iGen3. And more recently, the first iGen3 was upgraded to a new Xerox iGen4 EXP press. Today, the department can handle anything its customers throw at it—from 150,000 postcards to more typical runs of up to 7,000 finished brochures.

"We do an awful lot of media guides for our athletic teams and a lot of 24- to 28-page booklets for our theater arts department," remarks French. The iGens let the shop handle these jobs with ease.

Quick Turnaround a Necessity

At Ithaca College, like at so many higher education in-plants, survival comes down to how quickly you can fill the order. "If it has to stay in my shop more than three days, I'll lose the work to an outside vendor," says French.

Turn times had averaged between seven and 10 days in the past. That's all changed now.

"It's not unusual for us to get a file on a Friday afternoon and need 2,800 finished booklets by Tuesday—or 100 booklets in two hours," says French. "With our iGens, we can do it."

Both the iGen3 and the iGen4 give the department the level of quality that customers expect. And with its digital workflow, the department has better control.

"Xerox color gives us a better match to offset than any other digital technology I've seen," lauds French.

The in-plant also uses a networked Xerox DocuColor 260 digital color copier and relies on two networked Xerox 4112s for monochrome jobs.

The in-plant outputs between 350,000 and 450,000 pages per month, about 85 percent of the college's work. Jobs include course books, class handouts, posters, postcards, brochures, forms, flyers, wide-format banners, magnets and door hangers.

To handle envelope printing, the in-plant recently added an OKI DP100 envelope press. This has been very busy lately due to a high demand for envelopes sporting Ithaca College's new logo, part of a college rebranding project. This rebranding has also upped the demand for business cards. The in-plant prints them on its iGen4 and then slits them using a Duplo DC-645 slitter/cutter/creaser. French notes that the DC-645 has also allowed the in-plant to perforate and slit tickets for sports events at the college's new athletic facility.

The department further enhanced its value by blending print and Web services in a unique cross-media campaign targeting Ithaca College alumni (see sidebar). It partnered with Xerox Global Services (XGS) to tap into the variable-data capabilities of XMPie software.

What's more, by implementing Xerox FreeFlow Web Services software, the department plans to offer customers online ordering convenience very soon.

"Xerox is helping us bring value to the shop and to the institution," says French.

Every step of the way, he notes, the department has had the help and support of its Xerox representative.

"Our rep has done a fantastic job, restructuring our leases so we could affordably add the equipment we needed," says French. "It's really been a great partnership."