Challenges

• District print shop was reaching capacity with its existing workflow and solutions
• Scanning and pre-press was inefficient and time-consuming
• Needed to balance out volume

Solution

• QDirect – Output Manager
• WebCRD – Web to print submission software
• Barcode workflow
• LDAP user authentication custom

Results

• Order volume increased 738% in five years without adding staff
• Save $100,000 in chargebacks/yr.
• Teachers save about 48,750 hours annually with WebCRD
• Increase in volume from 50 print jobs/day to 1000+ jobs/day in peak

Customer Background/Solution Overview

Blue Valley Unified School District’s Print Shop had a good thing going. Print volume was high and operators were hard at work delivering jobs in a timely manner. But at Blue Valley, good enough isn’t good enough. The District knew they could do better and set out to take a good Print Shop and make it great. The District’s print shop was reaching capacity with its existing workflow and structure.

Carbon-based copy request forms required a manual process that resulted in four-day turnaround times for basic copy jobs. Scanning hardcopy jobs was a bottleneck and the quality of originals was degrading. Only 10 to 20% of jobs were being archived. Pre-press time was spent dealing with fonts, applications, and imposition issues.

Blue Valley used one vendor for their copiers and another vendor for production. Only one-third of their copier fleet was networked before the change to the new copier program. Business cards were being sent out for printing. And basic repetitive functions in the print shop were becoming another bottleneck as the volume grew.

Blue Valley determined that 14% of the building fleet was producing 86% of the volume, with the majority of those jobs being printed on distributed copiers. The District knew that many of those jobs could be printed centrally, on efficient production equipment, saving staff time and money for the school district . Blue Valley decided it would be wiser to invest in new technology to meet the production demand instead of throwing more people at an outdated solution.

They selected Rochester Software Associates, Inc. for a number of reasons. The RSA solution was a modular, proven system and Blue Valley would not be a test case. RSA was the only single company with all the components they needed, so there would not be any handoffs between different vendors. RSA’s relationships with many equipment vendors gave them confidence that the solution would work now and in the future. After adding QDirect.SCAN and WebCRD, the results have exceeded expectations. “Teachers are thrilled,” raves Jason Gillam, Assistant Director of Business Operations.

“They need quick turnaround. They need control. They need to know when they are getting the job back. Blue Valley’s focus is on ensuring that resources are directed at students to support our mission, vision and goals. We’re giving teachers and staff the right tools to take the pressure off them when it comes to reproducing documents. It’s not often that the printing production staff gets to help drive success in the classroom.”

Setting High Standards

The Blue Valley School District in the heart of Kansas is a growing K-12 district with over 30 schools and over 3,250 staff serving 22,000 students.

A focus on academic excellence means that Blue Valley students have a graduation rate of 97.4 percent and the highest ACT average test scores in the metro area, far exceeding state and national averages. Blue Valley was the only school district in the nation with more than 20,000 students to achieve Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) for the district and every school within the district for eight years in a row, according to research conducted by the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

Setting Goals

“Our overall goal was to balance out some of our volume, to promote a healthy printing system in each building and across the district while controlling costs,” recalls Jason Gillam, Assistant Director of Business Operations. Through research, the District found that printing and copying is different for everyone. A solution had to accommodate job submission that worked for all users, from the web-savvy to the non-technical.

The Report Card

Blue Valley decided on QDirect.SCAN Scan to Print software and WebCRD, the Web to print submission tool, from Rochester Software Associates. The District’s print shop has added capacity without adding people, increasing volume and allowing the staff and educators to focus on their jobs. “When we started with this process we had about 75% black and white being printed outside the Print Shop,” notes Gillam. “With the RSA solution, everything is tracking toward a fifty-fifty split.” Order volume has grown from 12,491 to 104,651 in five years– a 738% increase

Print and Reprint

“What teachers really like now is the ability to reorder. Our teachers tend to reorder jobs on a regular basis. The catalog repository is now in WebCRD, whether the job is coming into QDirect.SCAN or WebCRD.” This is possible due to QDirect.SCAN’s “Scan to Archive” capability. Users scan, ticket, and submit hardcopy jobs directly from a supported MFP (Multi-function printer). The user receives a confirmation page, directly at the MFP, with thumbnails on the reverse side.

Jobs can be queued for manual or automated printing, based on business rules defined by the Print Shop. With Scan to Archive, scanned jobs can be archived for future ordering via WebCRD, meaning no more looking for originals or quality loss from making copies of a copy of a copy! WebCRD’s AutoStock module lets staff reorder standardized forms, tests, and other documents. Business cards and other Variable Data personalized documents can also be ordered.

1 + 1 > 2!

If Blue Valley had just adopted either QDirect.SCAN or WebCRD, it would have helped drive volume to their centralized Print Shop, but the combination of RSA’s integrated Scan and Web to print solutions makes the two components better than the sum of their parts. Scanned jobs can be reordered via the web, and jobs submitted via the web can flow through QDirect’s order management logic and accounting logs.

This allows Print Shops to batch release jobs based on business rules such as location. This way, all jobs destined for a specific school can be printed at the same time, to facilitate courier delivery.

Lights Out, Productivity Up

Blue Valley makes impressive use of two of WebCRD’s automation features that have allowed them to increase volume without adding staff though efficiencies they have gained. These capabilities are AutoFlow and a barcode scanning workflow. AutoFlow uses business rules to automatically flow jobs direct to printers without operator action. Over 69% of the shop’s jobs now use AutoFlow, and they continually seek ways to expand its use.

The barcode scanning workflow eliminates touches and the time of locating jobs and updating status by simply updating job status via scanning the barcode on every job’s coversheet. Job status is instantly updated in WebCRD for operators and users to see. Tracking information is available for end users and print center staff, and updates are made without any typing. This time saver has enhanced customer service and eliminated mistakes.

“Since adding WebCRD, we’ve had a 738% volume increase without adding staff or increasing our budget to the school, while saving $100,000 in chargebacks annually and an estimated nearly 50,000 hours of teacher time annually that can be put back into the classroom. We would have never reached this point without WebCRD.” Jason Gillam, Assistant Director of Business Operations

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