University of Missouri Adds iGen3

Despite having a six-color, 40˝ press, a digital "Quickcopy" center and a top-notch Web storefront, Rick Wise felt his in-plant's capabilities weren't quite as advanced as they could be.

That all changed in December when the University of Missouri-Columbia installed a new Xerox iGen3 digital production press in its 81-employee operation.

"It's a huge part of our future," enthuses Wise, director of Printing Services. "To be all that we can be to the university and provide the full service, we had to have what we feel are top-drawer capabilities in both offset and toner."

While researching the purchase, the in-plant looked closely at similar production color printers, but the discounts Xerox offered for black impressions, as well as the range of substrate types and sizes the iGen3 could handle, pushed the in-plant towards it.

"It's got a lot of significant innovations where we felt like the quality was unparelled," Wise explains.

The in-plant had been using a Xerox 2060 for the past five years, but Wise didn't feel that was enough.

"You really can't even compare the two devices," he says.

The iGen3 positions the in-plant to enter a whole new market.

"We wanted to gear ourselves up for variable data," Wise says. Though the in-plant dabbles in it now, Wise plans to market variable data printing aggressively to the school's Admissions, Development and Athletics departments.

The iGen3 has been installed in the central part of Printing Services' 53,000-square-foot facility, near prepress and customer service, rather than in the digital print room with the DocuTechs. Wise is even vacating his office to give the duplication supervisor a room near the iGen3 for customer meetings.

Wise is quick to point out that the iGen3 is not the first step down the road to an offset-free future.

"I think it's a beautiful compliment to offset. I'm by no means predicting the demise of offset," he says. "We felt like this brought us up to the same level [in digital printing] as our excellent offset side."

That offset side has won the in-plant numerous In-Print awards over the years, including three Best of Show awards.

Wise also points out that his pressroom is currently extremely busy.

"We've been running our six-color press literally about 24 hours a day, seven days a week...about 80 percent of the time for the last couple of months," he says. "It's been really, really, really busy."