In-plants and Inkjet: A Good Mix

Across the country, several in-plants have added production inkjet presses and are seeing positive results. One of them is Excellus BlueCross BlueShield Document Services, in Rochester, N.Y., which installed a Ricoh InfoPrint 5000 AD3/AD4 about a year ago, bringing significant cost savings to the non-profit health insurance company. The marketing department has increased the large-volume campaigns it is doing for various market segments due to the advantages inkjet printing has provided.

In Denver, the State of Colorado’s Integrated Document Solutions (IDS) operation is in the final stage of contracting with the awarded vendor it selected to provide an inkjet production press. The in-plant made a deal to replace three Xerox Nuvera printers with an inkjet press, a move that will save 20 percent in monthly expenditures.

“The majority of our work has really moved toward correspondence printing,” says Mike Lincoln, IDS northern regional manager. The demand for transactional statements has been on the rise, he says, “and our current equipment was really lagging in keeping up.”

The inkjet press, once installed in late November, will bring faster printing speeds, customer cost savings and additional transactional print volume from other municipalities that have a need for it.

“We saw a lot of opportunity there,” Lincoln says.

The inkjet press will also allow the in-plant to offer transpromotional printing by selling the unused white space on tax statements, for example, to another agency that wants to send citizens a message, such as a license renewal reminder.

“We’re hoping another agency will subsidize the cost of that print,” Lincoln says. “Our idea is to share the cost of printing, versus making additional revenue, and I think that will take us into a whole new arena with regards to public sector printing. If I can drive additional value to other customers, it really helps solidify our position and makes us less of an outsource candidate.”