Digital Upgrades Support High-end Marketing at Marist College

As departments at Marist College increasingly use their copiers for smaller jobs, the in-plant has found itself handling more of the color-critical variable data marketing work needed by the Poughkeepsie, N.Y., college.

“The color work we’re doing is more and more the high-end marketing pieces for enrollment services and advancement,” remarks Alex Podmaniczky, assistant director of the Enterprise Solutions Group.

When it came time to replace the in-plant’s Canon imagePRESS C6000, the in-plant wanted a color device that was up to the task. Podmaniczky turned to his peers on a higher-education listserv, several of whom related their great experiences with the Xerox 700 digital color press. At the nearby State University of New York at New Paltz, Jim Lyons, Print & Mail Services Manager, also sang the praises of the 700.

So when Podmaniczky heard about the Xerox Color J75 Press—the next step up from the 700—and learned that it could maintain its rated speed of 75 pages per minute with heavier and coated stocks, “that was very appealing to me,” he says. “It just seemed like a good match for our work.”

Marist’s Digital Publications Center runs a lot of post cards, and Podmaniczky wanted to be able to print on 10-point coated stock for hours at a time without misfeeds. The J75 seemed to be the answer.

In June, the three-employee in-plant installed both a Color J75 and its office-range cousin, the Color C75, which replaced the Canon imageRUNNER Advance C5051 in the in-plant’s self-service area. The shop also swapped its Canon imagePRESS 1110 for a new Xerox D110 monochrome light production printer.

Though the D110 has an inline booklet maker, the color machines came without inline binding.

“We’re in a very confined space and I was really looking to recover lost real estate,” Podmaniczky explains. Color jobs will be scored on the shop’s Duplo 445, folded on its Baum Ultrafold 714 and finished using a Duplo 120 booklet maker. Also, a new Spiral James Burn DocuPunch is on the way, he says.

Some of the primary types of jobs being produced on the Color J75 are variable data pieces, such as post cards, certificates and pledge cards. The shop uses PrintShop Mail VDP software from Objectif Lune. One such job is a personalized four-page award letter for the student financial services office, which includes both variable data and variable images. The in-plant produced about 2,500 of those.

Podmaniczky points out that lease costs for the new digital devices are nearly half of what the in-plant was paying previously.

“Over the term of the lease, I’m saving over $243,000 for the institution,” he says, “and still have the same production capabilities—and increased speed by 15 (ppm) on my color production machines, and on my walkup machine I went from 50 (ppm) up to 75 (ppm).”