EDU Business Solutions

When Gerry Pinela took over as supervisor of Central Services for the City of Torrance, Calif., in June of 2007, the job submission process at the nine-employee in-plant was somewhat laborious. Customers filled out a three-part NCR form, and then the staff manually entered the job information into an Excel spreadsheet. The manual process was time consuming and lacked the tracking and reporting capabilities Pinela needed to effectively manage the workflow.

After nearly 20 years in a cramped, subterranean facility with uneven floors and equipment in different rooms, Mark Tindell was more than ready to move his in-plant. The director of Mail and Print Services at Columbia College says space was so tight he even had a wide-format printer crammed into his office.

The Dickinson College Print Center still had a year left on the lease of its Xerox iGen3 digital color press when the Carlisle, Pa., in-plant decided to replace it in July. Kenneth Ball, director of User Services, had two very good reasons for upgrading to an iGen4 Diamond Edition. 

Winter was just settling in at the University of Cincinnati's campus back in January of 2012 when the sneak attack came. Agents from the facilities management (FM) arm of a popular print equipment vendor set up a meeting with the university's financial committee. With no one from the in-plant present, they began dishing out promises of cost savings if the university allowed the FM to handle its printing.

With traditional offset exhibitors like Heidelberg giving the Chicago trade show a pass, the digital print vendors were the new kings. Xerox, Canon, Konica Minolta and Fujifilm led the pack in booth size, and each of them had new inkjet production presses to proclaim.

It’s been just over a year since Franklin University Printing Services opened for business and began saving money for the 111-year-old private university, based in Columbus, Ohio. In its first 12 months, the three-employee operation has saved nearly $110,000 over what it would have cost to outsource that work.

When Robert Donahue started as director of purchasing at Franklin University, one of his goals was to revamp the mailing services operation and cut costs. His success there got him thinking about other ways to save money for the 111-year-old private university, based in Columbus, Ohio. In particular, he wondered how much the university was spending to outsource printing and whether the school could save money by getting equipment and printing that work in-house.

Held in the sleepy state capital of Harrisburg, Pa., in late April, the 47th annual Association of College and University Printers conference brought together nearly 100 higher-ed in-plant managers from all corners of the country—and from four other countries.

After putting up with an inefficient, Excel-based job management system for years, Ashland University Printing & Imaging Solutions acquired EDU Business Solutions' Print Shop Pro Manager software. Since then, life has been so much simpler for the in-plant's six full-time and four part-time and student workers. Customers can now pull up previous jobs and review the details, sparing staff from fielding their calls.

MARY BOCCHIETTI’S heart sank when she arrived at the Pueblo City School District’s in-plant one July morning in 2009 and saw three feet of muddy water filling the entire shop. A water main had burst during the night, flooding the lower level of the district’s administration building, where the nine-employee Document Services Center (DSC) resided.