Innovate Magazine - Spring 2008 - (Page 26)

creating a streamlined high-volume production facility ACCO LADES accolades from administrators and teachers as well as the attention of visiting school districts. There is even a waiting list for schools to join the program named, appropriately, “Accolade!” The Challenge With 43,000 students and 50 schools spread over several towns, producing the volumes of printed materials required was Other school districts have a budgetary black hole visited Manatee to see how for administrators and a they achieved success with their automated Web and Scan major time sink for teachto Print Center. The solution is ers. With the constant called Accolade, which stands ﬁnancial pressures found for Accessible Client Copy Opportunity Link for Advanced in any school district, Document Enhancement! taking a new approach was both a strategic imperative and a signiﬁcant challenge. But another word for challenge is opportunity. TEAM APPROACH EARNS School district of Manatee County print center earns accolades, one page at a time | By Todd Bernhard o outsource or not to outsource? That was the question facing the School District of Manatee County. An internal audit determined that print jobs were leaking to third-party providers or being printed on low-quality printers, using expensive ink cartridges. Teachers were wasting time making their own copies. The jobs that were indeed being produced in-house required manual accounting, which led to reporting delays of weeks or months. Something had to be done. The very future of the in-plant was at stake and unless it could become an efﬁcient, automated print center, it was doomed. Innovate Spring 08 Manatee’s challenge lay in two areas. First, there were manual processes for creation and production of classroom materials such as handouts, exams, and worksheets. The average teacher spent two hours each week at the copier, duplicating class materials or using costly-to-operate inkjet printers. Hardcopy documents were sent via courier to a centralized print center, but the paper ticket ordering system was prone to inaccuracies and made accounting a manual process. Hardcopy jobs had to be ready for the courier or be delayed a full day. An order could take up to a week to be produced and returned to a teacher. It was not uncommon for frustrated teachers to spend their own money at an outside print shop to ensure they would have the materials completed in time for class. Untrackable Costs Second, individual schools had both the authority and responsibility to acquire copiers or printers for their school. The aggregate effect was to create a structure of untrackable and escalating costs. Because the machines used were inevitably from different manufacturers and had varying capabilities and were not networked, there were no economies of scale. Service and reliability were always in question, and the actual cost of copying and printing was virtually impossible to measure. “We just didn’t have a good handle on copying costs,” T Rochester Software Associates, Inc., along with Xerox Corporation, delivered the right tools and perhaps more importantly, the right people, to turn the school district’s in-plant into a streamlined high-volume production facility. Volume has increased signiﬁcantly, without any increase in staff, and all jobs are automatically accounted for. The program has earned 26

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Innovate Magazine - Spring 2008

Innovate - Spring 2008 Table of Contents 10 Tips for Successful Open Houses The TransPromo Path Escape the Complexity Putting a Price on Value A Welcome Boost to Hospitality Team Approach Earns Accolades Bound Together New Highs in Image Quality Transforming the Business of Processing Photos Predictive Maintenance Making the Right Choice Diving into Digital Book Production Doing More With Less Distributed Document Creation

Innovate Magazine - Spring 2008

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