Kilgore College Becomes ‘All-Digital Shop’

With the retirement of his offset pressman last August, Mike Ford, Print Services manager at Kilgore College in Kilgore, Texas, decided to retire his offset presses as well.

“We are going through some really tough financial times here in Texas with our higher education system, and when my pressman told me that he was retiring, I knew that we would not be able to replace him,” Ford points out. “There are just not a lot of offset pressmen or bindery operators in this area.”

The three-employee in-plant was also feeling the strain because of the cost of materials, since the in-plant was still using a film-based platemaking process instead of a computer-to-plate (CTP) workflow.

“So we decided to become an all-digital shop,” says Ford.

Then the search began. Ford checked out digital printers from several different vendors.

“I looked at all of the equipment that we thought we could afford, and spent most of the winter justifying this with my management,” he recalls. “In the end, I liked the Konica Minolta bizhub C8000 digital color press because it represented offset more than the other presses that I tested.”

Ford made three trips to visit with Konica Minolta. On his third visit, he took his two employees.

“Kelly Bonicelli, my copy center technician, who has been running black-and-white copiers and digital printers for 25 years, was ecstatic with the way the C8000 performed because she knew it would raise our production level to a much higher quality,” Ford says. “So this made the decision process a lot easier.”

In August, the in-plant replaced its Canon and Ricoh black-and-white printers with the C8000, becoming the first print shop to purchase this press in the East Texas area. At the same time, the in-plant added a Konica Minolta bizhub Pro 1200 black-and-white digital press. The Konica Minolta devices have allowed the in-plant to produce all of its projects in-house for the college’s faculty and staff. Some of those printed products include color postcards, flyers, posters and program literature.

“One of the things that we are most proud of here is that we are now able to print a complete football program on those new machines,” Ford says. “In the past, we had to print black-and-white images on our offset presses and had to have the cover printed outside, which took about 35 man hours to complete the job.

“Now, we print the cover on the C8000 press, and then print the black-and-white work in the 1200 press—which also has a saddle-stitch binder,” he says. “It only took us four man hours to print the football program, and the quality was excellent.”