School In-plant Replaces Four Toner Printers With One Inkjet Press

At the beginning of July, Hillsboro School District Printing Services installed the Canon varioPRINT iX, a digital inkjet press that replaced four of the Hillsboro, Oregon-based in-plant’s Canon toner machines — an imagePRESS C810 and three varioPRINT DP 140s.

The inkjet press has now been up and running since the end of July, and many benefits have already been realized. For one, the in-plant is running into far fewer maintenance issues.

“We started looking at inkjet because we were frustrated,” says Dave Bryson, Printing Services manager. “Every toner machine has the same issues. With inkjet starting to be more available, we started looking at it so we have a more reliable machine that's faster. We replaced four machines with this one, and I think in the last two months, we've had one service call. We're not supplementing service calls with operators doing extra maintenance or anything — the machine’s just running all the time.”

This has been helpful for the in-plant’s small staff. According to Bryson, one operator prints everything, and the other handles bindery and wide-format. The in-plant has a Canon Colorado M3W roll-to-roll printer and installed a 30" Roland VersaOBJECT CO-300 flatbed UV printer at the end of October.

Rob Wills monitors the Canon varioPRINT iX digital inkjet press at Hillsboro School District Printing Services.

Reducing the number of digital printers has also alleviated some of the pressure off the staff.

“Before the iX, we had six printers and one operator running them, which is almost impossible to keep them all running efficiently,” Bryson says. “So now I have two printers [the iX and a Canon varioPRINT Titan 6220] and one operator, and we run almost nonstop.”

Even with the smaller fleet, Printing Services has been outpacing its efforts in previous years.

“We get a lot of orders at the end of August and beginning of September when the teachers come back and order the stuff that they should have ordered in June, and we're usually backlogged until December,” Bryson says. “This year, we printed everything by the third week of September, which we've never been able to do before.”

Jeremiah Wade runs the Roland VersaOBJECT CO-300 flatbed UV printer.

The in-plant primarily prints curriculum for the school district, Bryson says, however the shop also produces work for nonprofits, the city, and other school districts, printing everything from business cards and bookmarks, to magazines and signage.

Printing Services has used all sorts of paper to print on the Canon iX — including uncoated, gloss, heavy-weight, synthetic, and colored paper — without any issues. Bryson says the press has exceeded his quality expectations.

“The school district that we print for is getting a level of quality that they've never even dreamed of,” he says. “Everybody's pretty excited about it.”

Another benefit of installing the Canon iX was that it prevented some of the in-plant’s business from going elsewhere.

“We ended up with the same equipment that our competitors also got,” Bryson says. “We could have inadvertently — by not going to inkjet — lost business. This was about a two-year journey for us to figure out the best thing to get, and at that same time, a commercial shop actually sent pricing into our district — and they were offering color cheaper than we were offering color to our own people. That was an eye-opening moment of the shift in the industry. Every so often, new technology comes along that changes how people are doing business, and being in a position to not be able to beat an outside company printing our own stuff is not somewhere I wanted to be.”

Nick Rawls in the mail center.

Recalling the installation process, Bryson says there weren’t too many hiccups. Initially, he thought the ceiling might need to be raised for the vent, but after communicating with Canon about the specs, he learned it wasn’t necessary. The in-plant did, however, have to make adjustments to ensure the environmental conditions would allow the best print quality possible.

“There's some hoops you have to jump through with the bigger inkjet machines with room humidity and temperature,” he explains. “And this press requires compressed air, and we didn't have any before. There was a little bit of upfront investment to get the environment the way it needed to be for inkjet, but looking back, it's stuff that I wish we would have done when we were just toner. The humidity requirements for the inkjet would have also helped us out in our previous configuration, because we had a lot of static problems.”

Bryson notes that the installation of the iX was unanimously approved by the school board after members learned about the benefits it would bring.

“One of the reasons why it was so easily approved by the board was, being a school district, graduation rates and comprehension and test scores are important,” Bryson says. “Printing things in color improves comprehension, which improves test scores, which improves graduation rates. The cost to print color on inkjet is so much lower than toner that we're able to offer color and black-and-white at the same price. So, we are printing a lot more in color, and we got a standing ovation from all the admins and principals when they found out that the printing of color was no longer an issue.”

To top it all off, Bryson anticipates paying off the money the in-plant borrowed from the district to purchase the press well ahead of the agreed upon five-year deadline.

“Our plan is to grow, and most likely, we'll probably have everything paid off in three years,” Bryson says. “Then after that, we'll be saving up money to reinvest, so the next time we won't need to borrow money from the school.”