Highlight Color Thriving at School District In-plant
Highlight color printing is booming at Parma City School District's in-plant.
February 2010 By Bob NeubauerA FEW years back, Parma City School District's in-plant faced a dilemma. The 13,000-student district, just south of Cleveland, wanted spot color on some of its documents, but the in-plant's equipment could not cost effectively provide it. Its Xerox DocuColor 8000 was up to the task, but page costs for spot color would be high. Likewise, inking up the shop's two-color presses would be expensive for short runs.
"We wanted to offer something in between," remarks Dan Salloum, Production Printing foreman.
So in 2007, the six-employee in-plant added a Xerox DocuTech 180 HighLight Color (HLC) system. The machine was immediately busy, and the district found more and more uses for it. Documents that had always been black and white were given highlight color makeovers. Business picked up so much that, in November 2008, the shop added a second DocuTech 180 HLC.
Today, the in-plant uses the two machines not only for two-color printing but for all of its black-only digital printing as well. Printing costs on black-only documents are the same as they were on the DocuTech 6115 that the shop previously used. Two-color jobs cost about one-third of a cent more than black-only jobs and five times less than full color.
The district uses highlight color to emphasize key parts of documents. For example, a postcard on new rules about student attire called out the changes with green type.
"You can really get your point across with highlight color," remarks Salloum.
Also, commencement programs and other documents for the district's three high schools can now include each school's colors.
Some jobs have been moved off the shop's Itek and Ryobi presses and onto the 180 HLCs, notes Ray Sposet, community outreach specialist.
"Letterhead had always gone on the presses before," he says. "Now we can put that on the two-color [HLC printers]."
Because stationery and business cards can now be printed in one pass, the in-plant no longer has to preprint and warehouse these items, saving some $50,000 a year. (With the additional storage space, Parma purchases paper at a significant large-quantity discount.)
The in-plant uses the Xerox FreeFlow make–ready system to create, store and submit files to its digital printers. The DocuTech 180 HLC printers produce two-color pages at 180 pages per minute with resolutions of 600x2,400 dots per inch (dpi) in black and 600x600 dpi in highlight color. Interposer trays allow the shop to insert color pages produced on the DocuColor 8000. Inline tape binding and stapling enables the systems to produce finished books, such as the district's comprehensive annual financial reports.
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