Digital Expansion at Tucson Unified School District
If you happen to be driving around in Tucson, Ariz., and a school bus passes you sporting a large color banner, there’s a good chance you’re looking at the work of Michael Ortiz’s in-plant.
The 10-employee print shop at the Tucson Unified School District (TUSD) has been putting its new Epson Stylus Pro 9800 to good use printing signage for the district’s buses, as well as vinyl banners for its 110 schools.
“We can do that cheaper than the commercial shops,” says Ortiz, Print Shop manager, “and I can make this available to other school districts also. It’s a revenue source for us, but it also helps other school districts.”
The bus signs both promote public education (to head off competition from local charter schools) and spread public service messages—discouraging bullying or smoking, for example. Posters printed for schools may promote kindergarten programs or provide information for staff. The shop recently printed 75 vinyl banners—one for each elementary school.
The district contracted with a vendor for the initial bus signage. Ortiz then called TUSD’s transportation director and let him know the in-plant could do it cheaper. The shop replaced its old Epson 10000 in February with the new eight-color 9800. It uses Epson UltraChrome weatherproof ink, which dries instantly.
“It works great,” Ortiz enthuses.
Also new to the print shop are a Mitsubishi ECO 1630IIIR computer-to-plate device, a Xerox 4110 and a Xerox 250.
“We had a big surge in digital black-and-white printing,” explains Ortiz—due in part to new testing requirements for Arizona schools. So the shop replaced its Xerox 490 with the 4110. It is now doing 1.2 million digital prints a month, he says.
The in-plant also swapped its DocuColor 12 for the 250, boosting its color output speed to 50 pages per minute. And as a bonus: “We did all of that for less than what we were paying for all the older equipment,” Ortiz reveals.
As for the new CTP device, he says he got the idea after seeing a presentation at last year’s In-plant Printing and Mailing Association conference and talking with other managers there.
“Everyone is going away from film,” he remarks. The poly plates produced on the Mitsubishi ECO 1630IIIR cost just $2 each, he says—a big savings over what it used to cost to have plates made on the outside. Cost-saving measures like this, as well as the increase in work due to insourcing and keeping jobs in-house, have helped the print shop stay in the black, Ortiz says, after years of losing money.
“It’s an exciting time for us,” he says.
With more than 68,000 students and 7,000 teachers and staff, TUSD is Arizona’s second largest district.
- Companies:
- Epson America
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.
