A Better Way to Manage

Located in the southern portion of western Oregon's Willamette Valley, about two hours south of Portland, Springfield Public Schools (SPS) is the second largest employer in the city of Springfield. Its 22 schools host about 10,600 students and employ 800 teaching staff and 400 administrators and support staff.

Providing the printed material that supports all of them is SPS Print and Design Services, overseen by Production Manager Doug Darling, who has been with the district for eight years. Comprising three print centers, the operation has a staff of five full-time employees and three cooperative work experience students when school is in session. The students, in addition to being paid, earn educational credits.

SPS Print and Design Services processes approximately 2,000 job tickets each month, with nearly all print requests submitted online through Print Shop Pro Webdesk, from edu Business Solutions. Those jobs are printed on one- and two-color Ryobi presses as well as a trio of digital devices.

This summer, the in-plant upgraded its capabilities when it installed two black-and-white Konica Minolta bizhub PRESS 1250s and a Konica Minolta bizhub PRESS C7000 color printer. Darling has been very impressed with the 7000.

"It doubled our color volume since we installed it," he remarks.

He enjoys being able to start a long-run job, then walk away and do other work, without worrying about it jamming.

Much of the color printing produced on the 7000, he says, is for outside customers—select non-profit education foundations and governmental organizations. As a self-supported operation, the in-plant relies on insourcing income to pay its bills and fund future upgrades. This, in turn, allows it to provide better service to SPS in support of its educational mission.

The shop also provides wide-format printing using two donated 42˝ HP 5500s. The demand is so great, Darling says, that wide-format printing now makes up a significant percentage of the shop's business.

A New Era of Print Management

Prior to implementing Print Shop Pro Manager print management software, the shop's entire process was manual. Employees were writing job tickets by hand, manually calculating costs and entering job details into a database for billing.

"It was garbage in, garbage out," remarks Darling. "We never knew what we had printed, or when…or if it was billed correctly. We learned we were losing between $7,000 and $12,000 in revenue over a period of a year." Billing sometimes took two or three months to be completed, he says.

Darling knew the operation needed a better way to manage workflow, quickly price jobs, consistently receive accurate pricing information and eliminate the intensive billing process. This led to a year-long investigation into print management software solutions.

Darling and others in the organization evaluated four print management solutions, watching online demos and visiting sites to see the software in operation. They quickly identified Print Shop Pro as having been built to handle both their account number structure and the large number of users they would need to support. After learning that Print Shop Pro was developed specifically for a cost-neutral print operation, Darling was impressed.

"No other system was like that. Print Shop Pro was the only system that had the feature sets we needed to get the job done," he says.

Darling liked that Print Shop Pro supported SPS budget codes and offered a drop down list for customers to easily choose the appropriate budget code. He also liked its user-friendly online order process and that it offered a solution for managing both offset presses and digital printers. Plus, the exportable chargeback report would eliminate the time-consuming, manual data entry required to complete billing.

Once the purchase of Print Shop Pro was finalized, a two-day on-site training session was conducted. After that, the system was up and operational.

Marketing the System

To get schools comfortable with submitting their orders online, the in-plant devoted about five months to training customers. Laptops in hand, they went to each school to conduct training sessions with the users following along, completing the registration process and submitting orders.

"We were aiming for 80 percent online ordering within five months," Darling says. "But due to all the interaction and support we provided, the results were 93 percent."

Printed guidelines and online video presentations on how to register and enter orders have been created and are available to users. SPS Print and Design customers are encouraged to call with every question to be sure all questions are answered and every customer is comfortable with the process.

Darling says that online job submission has improved the shop's turnaround time and ability to manage workflow.

"We've tripled our output by immediately assigning jobs to our three different print centers," he says.

He likes the fact that customers can independently check job status and look up previous jobs.

"I felt like I was a telephone operator before implementing Print Shop Pro. Now, when they do call, I can provide immediate detailed information," he says.

Thanks to Print Shop Pro, he adds, turnaround time for standard photocopy jobs has improved from five days to next-day service for jobs submitted online by 2:00 p.m.

"We're guaranteeing 24-hour turnaround on copy-only work," he says.

As he looks to the future, Darling plans to utilize the capabilities of the new Konica Minolta 7000 to expand the amount of color printing the in-plant does for outside clients, since this revenue underwrites his operation. He is also working to formalize a program that will provide better training for student workers so they're prepared to take jobs in printing after they graduate.