Konica Minolta Business Solutions U.S.A.

So much work had been flooding into one school district in-plant that the manager knew something had to be done. Test booklets, recruitment brochures, covers for student handbooks and many other items were testing the limits of the eight-employee in-plant’s equipment. To handle the work, the shop recently added a long list of new equipment—including a Xerox iGen3—and built a 3,000-square-foot addition to house it all. New on the shop floor are: • A Xerox iGen3 90 digital color press • A second Kodak Digimaster 9110 with an inline bookletmaker • A C.P. Bourg bookletmaker for the shop’s other 9110 • Two Konica Minolta

THE STATE of Ohio’s Printing and Mail Services operation had a lot going for it. Its facility on the west side of Columbus boasted a convenient loading dock, more than enough floor space and plenty of free parking. One thing it didn’t have, though, was easy access to customers, most of which were in downtown Columbus, a good 15 minutes away. “If you’re in the quick copy business, you really need to be around your customers,” acknowledges Joe Tucker, state printing administrator. “And being out here, logistically, wasn’t a good thing for us because everything we print, we ship downtown.” So when

OUR IN-PLANT just made a big change in the way it does business: we sprang for “Big Color”—a digital color press. Over an eight-month period we considered the Canon C7000VP, the HP Indigo 3050, the IKON CPP 650, the Kodak NexPress 2100, the Konica Minolta bizhub PRO C6500, Océ’s CPS900 and CS650 Pro, and Xerox’s DocuColor 6060, 7000 and 260. Many of you are considering a similar acquisition, so I will share some aspects of our experience with you.

Konica Minolta Printing Solutions is being merged with Konica Minolta Business Solutions. In unifying into one organization, the new business unit will be able to offer customers complete solutions for document creation, production and management ranging from small office/home office to workgroups and enterprises all the way up to large production operations with its technologically advanced line of products and services. Jun Haraguchi will continue to serve president and CEO of Konica Minolta Business Solutions. “By unifying under one umbrella organization, we are able to mobilize our full resources to take advantage of the business opportunity before us, while offering one point of contact to our

Only a couple of days after installing a Konica Minolta bizhub C6500 (with an external Fiery controller), Printing Services at California State University, Chico, put its latest addition to the test. “We had an emergency situation on the campus and the campus police called to find out how long it would take to get 100 copies of a missing persons’ poster done,” recalls Manager Dale Wymore. “I asked them to send the file directly to the Fiery, and we had them printed by the time they walked over to our building in less than five minutes. We had only had the printer for a couple

Meeting the printing needs of a 2,100-student liberal arts college is tough enough with just three employees. But when your main digital color printer can’t keep up with the growing volume of work—and you still have two years left on the lease—it’s time to take serious action. After shutting down its offset presses for good last June and putting its trust in its Canon CLC 4000, Allegheny College Printing Services, in Meadville, Pa., saw volume on the machine skyrocket. Clicks jumped from 19,000 to more than 40,000 a month. Unfortunately, the number of service calls grew as well. So Manager Mark Pritchard talked

SOMETIMES IT seems I’m chained to this desk, “observing” the industry through e-mails and Web sites. So I like to break away now and then to see for myself what’s happening in the world’s in-plants. Recently I caught a train up to New York to do just that. On a frigid winter day I walked through a sea of scarves and hats to the United Nations’ headquarters to visit one of the largest in-plants out there. Paul Kazarov, chief of the Publishing Section, took me for a walk through the U.N.’s vast underground in-plant, filled with just about every type of printing and binding

WHILE DIGITAL color has been the hot topic in the printing industry for the past few years, digital black-and-white printing still accounts for the majority of the digital print volume. According to InfoTrends, black-and-white devices produced 874 billion impressions and generated $17.8 billion in retail value of print in 2005. Total equipment revenues (equipment, supplies and service) reached $7.41 billion. Equipment vendors have not lost sight of this opportunity and have continued to introduce new and improved devices to replace existing digital black-and-white equipment, as well as to open new market opportunities. Vendors realize that selling equipment has become about more than feeds and

A partial, temporary shutdown allowed the Print Shop at Burlington County College to expand its digital color printing capabilities. Last June, the six-employee operation in Pemberton, N.J., was forced to crate its presses and move its remaining equipment across the hall into temporary quarters so the college could complete a heating/air conditioning replacement project in its area. To continue serving the color printing needs of customers during this disruption, Manager Stephen Amitrano arranged a three-month loan of a Konica Minolta bizhubPRO C500. The 50-ppm machine performed so well that Amitrano decided to keep it once the shop returned to its digs. “It’s a life saver,” he

Konica Minolta Business Solutions U.S.A. plans to expand into a new distribution channel by introducing two new brands: OnDemand SMB and OnDemand Publisher. With the tag line “Powered by Konica Minolta,” the OnDemand SMB and OnDemand Publisher product lines will offer a comprehensive selection of color, monochrome and Production Print systems to meet almost any application or budget.