Moving To Digital
After moving from offset to digital printing, this in-plant slashed turnaround time and increased business.
by Dan Pothier
A few years ago, Portsmouth City Public Schools, in Virginia, decided it was time to transform the existing offset print shop into a digital, on-demand print center.
Skipper Duck, assistant superintendent, and Dan Pendarvis, purchasing agent, hired me to run the center based on my experience as digital production supervisor at the U.S. Government's Defense Automated Printing Service (DAPS).
My first act was to transform the shop from being all offset to producing 80 percent of all jobs digitally. Since then, turnaround time has been slashed from three weeks to an average of three days, and rush jobs are produced overnight. Customers are bringing work to the in-plant that was once sent out to commercial printers.
At the heart of this success story is the Danka @ the Desktop platform, which includes Danka's integrated software suite to manage workflow produced by two Heidelberg Digimaster 9110 imaging systems. These dual systems have increased our print capacity, so we can now deliver complicated publications in record time.
The hardware is just one component of this solution, though. Equally important is the software, which facilitates management of digital document workflows by integrating scanned images, assembling documents from multiple sources and performing other productivity-enhancing tasks.
Picking Productivity Over Speed
When I came to Portsmouth, we initially installed a single Xerox DocuTech 6135 system because I had used this equipment at DAPS. But a year later, we decided to replace it with the two 9110 printers so that we could improve our productivity and provide online backup.
Since our Danka @ the Desktop solution is based on open systems, instead of a proprietary platform, I can send jobs from any PC directly to the printing systems without having to convert documents to a proprietary format that slows the machines down.
The 9110 system's rated speed of 110 pages per minute is slower than our previous printing system, but it is actually more productive because we are no longer hindered by conversions to a proprietary language. The 9110s are also extremely reliable, which adds to our productivity.
In addition to enhanced productivity, our new printing system also produces better image quality. The 9110 imaging system prints with higher quality thanks to its ability to lay down dense solids and accurate halftone screens. In the past, if we were running a textured stock with peaks and valleys, like Jersey Leatherette, our other equipment didn't get toner down into the paper. The 9110s have no problem at all with special stocks.
As a full-service in-plant, our department has digital color capabilities, as well as offset printing. We are boosting our digital color volumes and therefore are replacing low-volume laser copier-printers with two higher-speed color printers.
In addition, we operate a two-color A.B.Dick 9985 press to print spot color, full color and long-run jobs with one to four colors. A Multilith 1250 is kept on-hand to produce some 2.5 million envelopes each year. There's also a Riso GR3770 digital duplicator for forms and single-color envelopes.
Jobs that were once bound with a tape binder are now produced on the 9110 systems with an automatic, inline booklet maker. That eliminates most of the labor associated with the former tape binding operation. We still do occasional jobs that require GBC or tape binding or manual padding.
Meeting Customers' Expectations
Roughly 70 percent of the work produced on the 9110s are booklets printed on 11x17˝ stock, folded and stapled inline with the booklet maker to produce finished 81⁄2x11˝ books. These booklets include the "Code of Conduct" for students, summer activities program guides for the city recreation department, and teacher information booklets. We also print thousands of similar booklets on different subjects for use in the classroom. These are all done on the 9110 with its booklet maker.
This year we purchased 11x17˝ micro-perforated paper (which has two perforations 1˝ apart in the center) so students can tear the pages out of their booklets when assigned a specific lesson. In production, the 9110 systems can draw on any of six different paper drawers for color inserts, tabs and preprinted covers.
In the past, with offset presses, manual collating and tape binding, preparing these booklets was a cumbersome process. Now software expedites document processing on the front end, while the inline booklet maker automates finishing. Our labor is greatly reduced, and we can deliver documents to our customers in hours or days instead of weeks. This labor savings has allowed the shop to reduce part-time help from 14 people to just three. We maintain a full-time staff of seven people.
Other work produced by the shop includes newsletters, stationery, envelopes and forms. This includes work for the City of Portsmouth and the Hampton Roads Regional Jail. We also produce full-color printing for tourism departments and museums within the city. (The city celebrated its 250th Anniversary this year, and tourism printing was at an all time high.) On small runs we use color copier/printers, while for larger runs we use our A.B.Dick 9985. Most of this work consists of letter-size flyers and tabloid-size posters.
We handle all of the in-house forms printed for the jail, which has about 800 inmates. Most of the work is letter-size, bond or carbonless forms, with some informational booklets. We keep digital versions (PDF or TIFF images) of all forms so they can be printed on demand.
On Its Own And In The Black
Beginning in 2001, the shop was treated as a self-supporting entity. We finished in the black—while offering prices that average 10 to 20 percent below commercial printers in the area. Our continuing challenge to customers is that if they can get a lower quote somewhere else, we'll honor it—within reason.
My customers are free to choose an outside commercial printer for any project, so my shop must maintain a level of service that makes us the obvious choice for producing the project accurately, on time and within budget. My staff will do whatever is needed to make customers feel important, even if their work constitutes little revenue. No one on my staff is permitted to say, "We can't do that." For rare cases when we are not equipped to do a job, we subcontract it out.
In keeping with our customer-oriented approach, we support multiple ways to submit documents. Customers can submit jobs on a secure Web site, and will soon be able to use the site to check the status of an order, review billing, view a forms catalog with PDF files of each form, and order forms printed on-demand. Customers can upload application files in Word or Adobe PageMaker (the shop's standard for desktop publishing) as well as other off-the-shelf programs.
The shop averages more than 1 million impressions per month and I would like to double that volume. We are actively courting work from other school divisions. More volume will help us reduce costs for the schools and ensure our continuing ability to pay our own way.
