Going Wide with Deep Service

IF YOU want to avoid talk of outsourcing by your parent company, get a few of your fellow departments on your side. Scott Thompson, supervisor of Printing Services for Brookdale Community College, in Lincroft, N.J., says that his in-plant works closely with the marketing department, which has led to strong support.

“We have a great relationship with them,” he reports. “They’re giving us a lot of color work, so we now have a new wide-format color printer that prints 44? by up to 150 feet. The cost of the printer is less than half the cost of us sending the jobs outside, so it could potentially pay for itself in one fiscal year.”

Thompson says that volume is up 28 percent over the past three years. While increased color work is partly responsible for that rise, he also credits an increase in enrollment and a switch to a full online ordering system, NowPrint, from NowDocs, at the start of that time period.

“With the online job submission, people can send in jobs from their computer and not have to go to the copier,” he notes.

Asked how he justified the cost of the new software, Thompson says that the in-plant takes in more than 5,000 work orders each year.

“Our old work orders were in two or three parts, so we’re talking a couple of cases of paper, in addition to the manual inputting of the orders,” he relates. “We now save a lot of time—as well as paper.”

On the Cutting Edge

In addition to the wide-format printer and NowPrint online ordering software, the in-plant has also acquired folding equipment, a cutter, a three-hole drill, wide-format laminators and padding equipment within the last three years.

“Our director of Printing Services, Chic Raimondi, and our vice president of business and finance, George Fehr, have played an enormous part in our success,” says Thompson. “We are one of the top-rated two-year colleges in New Jersey, and the administration prides itself in being on the cutting edge of technology.”

Thompson makes sure to spread that knowledge to others through multiple department meetings.

“We do presentations to 30 to 40 clubs on campus to let them know what we do,” he says. “Quality is what sells, so quality is one of the main things that we try to do.”IPG

—By W. Eric Martin