Pflugerville Independent School District

• Print Case Study

Customer Background/Solution Overview

Pflugerville Independent School District, just outside Austin, Texas, includes six high schools, six middle schools and 21 elementary schools. Their 3,096 faculty serve more than 25,400 students.

The school district operates one copy center with ten production printers and nine full-time staff including one warehouse/ delivery person, one prepress/designer, one instructional material specialist, five dedicated technicians and one supervisor. The copy center supports faculty and administrative staff with everything from plain-paper, black and white work to pads, carbonless paper jobs, football programs and booklets. They even design and print school specific business cards with a school’s logo.

“Our role in the organization is to get teachers their materials so they don’t have to take time doing things themselves,” says Lauren Tarbet, Copy Center Supervisor. “Many of the schools have machines like ours, but we know it’s better and easier to just rely on the copy center. Teachers can focus on other parts of their job and leave the copying and printing to us.”

Efficiency Doesn’t Happen Overnight. It Takes Planning and Strategy.

Teachers once submitted hard copy jobs to the copy center through campus mail. It would often take a week or more to receive printed materials. Meanwhile, in the copy center, billing would take two full days a month to process. “We knew  the stone tablet method would no longer work so we looked into automation products,” explains Tricia Gilbert, Director of Auxiliary Services. “We initially purchased a different, less expensive Web to print product, but halfway through the process in 2013 we switched over to WebCRD due to a lack of support during start-up and the lack of functionality. You definitely get what you pay for. With WebCRD we now turn jobs around in two days and the billing takes me one hour per month versus two days.”

Automation to Multiple Printers Eased by Better Use of Multiple Solutions.

WebCRD offered Pflugerville ISD a good initial path to automating workflows. But after attending an RSA webinar, Pflugerville saw how another school district was using the product’s automation capabilities by adding AutoFlow™ rules to send jobs directly to their printers. Pflugerville realized they could do the same and increase utilization of their multiple printers in operation.

The next step came in 2016 when Pflugerville added QDirect, RSA’s output management software. This allowed them to add printer management and the ability to auto-route jobs to available printers with the specific stocks and finishing options needed for a job. The district was then able to take advantage of some of QDirect’s unique additional features such as job filtering, releasing jobs in batches to target printers, and prioritizing production by due date—jobs due on the same day have a higher priority than jobs with due dates further in the future. This prioritization allows the copy center to better manage production and improve their ability to meet due dates.

“QDirect and WebCRD have been a godsend,” says Tarbet. “We have two shifts, so these machines should be able to do 2.5 million impressions a month. We weren’t pushing as well as we could because without automation, we were spending too much time between jobs. Now we can just turn a printer on and a steady stream of jobs will just keep coming. It was an adjustment at first. People weren’t used to how much work we could handle. Now when we’re slow it’s really surprising.”

Superior Software is a Win/win for Satisfaction.

The copy center and their customers both benefit from greater efficiency and specific features of WebCRD and QDirect. “I like the ability to move orders through pre-production, production, post-production,” explains Tarbet. “I love the Make Ready option when there are additional things that need to be done to the order and it can stay in preproduction without getting in the way of the orders that are print ready.”

Customers love being able to see exactly what products will look like with the preview feature. Many systems don’t show you what the job will look like on pink with hole punch, for example. And of course, customers appreciate the quick turnaround time and the email notices when their jobs are being shipped. They don’t have to leave their desks to submit a job request or stand in long lines waiting for a copier.

Finally, campus and department administrators now have a way to verify jobs and account codes before they are sent to the copy center. And they receive detailed reports each month including charge back information.

The Proof of Improvement is Now in Black and White.

Before Pflugerville had access to WebCRD’s production dashboard reports, they could see that more orders were being done and turnaround had accelerated after automating operations, but they couldn’t measure the improvement. “The production dashboards are great,” adds Tarbet. “I was able to plug in an entire school years’ worth of numbers and unlock a significant amount of information about our productivity.”

© 2018 Rochester Software Associates, Inc. All brands and product names are registered trademarks of their respective companies. 8/2018