‘Flying into the Color’ at Mt. San Antonio College
The Xerox digital printers at Mt. San Antonio College have certainly gotten plenty of use over the years.
“We just pretty much ran them into the ground,” reports Jim Carl, supervisor of printing.
So the in-plant dug them up, traded them in and brought four new printers into its Walnut, Calif., shop:
n A new Xerox DocuColor 5000
n Two Xerox DocuTech 135s, with FreeFlow digital workflow
n A Xerox 4110
Since swapping its old Xerox 2060 for the 5000, Carl says, color printing at the four-employee in-plant has doubled.
“We were averaging from 25,000 to 30,000 [monthly impressions] on the...2060,” he says. “But since we’ve got the 5000, we’ve been up to 50,000 a month so far. The quality on that has really improved from the 2060.”
Customers who used to send only black-and-white work to the in-plant are now redesigning those projects in full color.
“We’ve really zapped out the monochrome and started flying into the color,” he remarks.
Plus the variable data printing capabilities of the equipment are piquing the interest of the Performing Arts and Marketing departments.
The ability to network the new equipment has brought additional workflow advantages.
“We can forward jobs from machine to machine, so it’s a beautiful thing,” says Carl, who has seen a lot of changes in his 27 years there. Though the in-plant still runs a pair of small offset presses (an A.B.Dick and a Win America press, together doing 100,000 impressions a month), digital printing has taken over. The shop does 3 million digital impressions a month in busy times, Carl says.
Also new is Xerox FreeFlow Web Services 6.0, powered by Press-sense, for online job submission. It converts files to PDFs and provides customers with online proofs.
“Once [the job] gets here and we run it, they get an e-mail saying that the job’s in progress,” Carl says. “Then they get an e-mail again when the job’s completed and ready to be picked up.”
- Companies:
- Xerox Corp.
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.
