State of Oregon

• Print Case Study

Customer Background/Solutions Overview

The State of Oregon print shop has been in operation since 1849. Located in the state capitol of Salem, they are the central print provider for the legislature, all state agencies, and some counties and cities throughout the state. They operate one central print shop with an internal secure print facility, one satellite office, and another in a secure facility within the state justice building for legal work. With 91 employees handling more than 11,000 jobs a year and 103 million impressions, they are the 4th largest government in-plant in the country.

Most of the print shop's work is official documents with variable data fed from a secure system, state mainframes and servers. Typical documents include vehicle titles and registrations, correspondence from state agencies and bills for review by the legislature. They also print posters, flyers and other materials for an entirely government client list. An end-to-end operation, they handle all printing, finishing and postage in house. This includes complete presorting of all work to achieve the lowest possible postage rate and create significant savings for the state. Completely digital since 2006, the print shop contracts out all offset work.

Oregon knew just what they were looking for in a Web to print solution.

In the early 2000s, the Oregon print shop started accepting jobs online. After first trying to have an outside company build a system for them, they eventually had an internal employee develop a system from scratch that served their needs for many years. After going through several challenging rounds of updates to meet changing needs and realizing their system required too much knowledge of printing by their customers, the shop began researching a solution that would work out of the box and be easily customizable.

The print shop had a thorough list of features they wanted in their solution, including:

• Easy job submission
• Available job history with reorder capabilities
• Automated production with dashboard and open API
• Ability to integrate with their IT systems
• Excellent service, training and support

"I had been looking for an online submission solution for a few years, explains Tim Hendrix, Oregon State Printer. "WebCRD fit the bill. It had the features we were looking for, supported chargebacks, and was built from the ground up for in-plants."

Oregon now leverages a suite of RSA printing solutions for their customers.

The State print shop uses RSA's WebCRD, QDirect and ReadyPrint to support their operations. "Moving to WebCRD has been a night-and-day transition," says Joe Verardo, Customer Relations Manager. "We have given so many tools back to our customers that save them time and effort." With WebCRD, State of Oregon employees can easily log into their account and reorder directly from their order history or from document catalogs without having to set up orders every time. The can also create private work groups to share limited proxy rights so co-workers can check on jobs if a co-worker is on vacation or unavailable for any reason.

QDirect output manager is used to maximize print utilization. The software re-tickets jobs that previously would have only been able to print on a specific printer to now print on any appropriate available printer in the shop.

"ReadyPrint [RSA's prepress software] has been great during the crunch of printing bills for the legislative sessions," says Hendrix. "One of our highest priorities is making sure that we get files and jobs preprogrammed up front before they go out on the floor." Throughout Oregon's two-year legislative session, the print shop prints bills for every legislator daily. They will receive as many as 200 files in the late afternoon that need to be printed, collated into bill packets and delivered to the state capitol by 4 am the next day. This happens for months on a nightly basis. "Before we used ReadyPrint, if we had to print 120 copies of 150 bills, we'd have to place them out on a table and manually pick and pack them for each customer because each legislator needed a different combination of bills." With ReadyPrint the jobs are created up front. They each now come off the printer, with the correct combination of bills, collated, and ready to be packed. The automated workflow has saved the State of Oregon the labor cost of at least 2 full-time employees.

Streamlined digital workflows benefit customers and print operations.

One of the greatest improvements the print shop has realized is the ability to correct jobs before they go into production and save the updated order information. They were looking for a way to improve their workflow when RSA shared what some other customers were doing. Verardo says, "Now a team of our customer service reps not only review orders and have a chance to fix them before printing, but the system also circles back and updates the order history so it will be right if a customer reorders that job in the future."

The production team also appreciates access to the preview customers approve when submitting their jobs. "I was working late one night, and an operator came over to say they weren't sure where the customer wanted a staple to be placed on a landscape job," recounts Verardo. "I realized SurePreview™ could do as much for us as our customers. I simply pulled up the preview the customer approved and knew exactly how they expected the job to be finished." We've saved tens of thousands of dollars per year by reducing reprints."

People matter as much as technology when planning for the future.

The State of Oregon print shop did thorough research before choosing RSA. "I had talked to a number of other in-plants when looking for a solution," says Hendrix. "I asked about ease of use of their software but also responsiveness of their customer service. RSA has been very responsive." The print shop also appreciates all the ways they can interact with RSA. Joe Verardo says, "It's been great having an online forum and having webinars posted, and I love the ‘ask the trainer' email address that's been set up."

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