WebCRD and QDirect Greatly Streamline Printing for Staff and Print Center

• Print Case Study

Customer Background/Solution Overview.

Volusia County Schools in DeLand, Florida includes 78 schools and serves 63,000 students with 7,749 district staff. Their one copy center prints everything from desk work and report cards to finished documents such as the code of conduct for every student. The copy center also serves the local government and area nonprofits. In fact, the Volusia County Schools copy center prints and finishes the County Agenda up to 3 times a month, and regularly prints the schedule of events for the county library.

With 7 employees, the copy center produces an average of 38,500 jobs a month, averaging almost 11 million pages a month for the district and 100,000 for county government. The copy center printed 131 million pages in 2017.

QDirect made the copy center much more efficient.

“I used to spend a considerable amount of time on charge back accounting every month,” says Betty Shepherd, Assistant Director of Printing and Copy Center. “With WebCRD and QDirect working together for online submission and print management, chargeback is automated and the schools have a better idea of what and who is printing at their site. This is a huge benefit. We can even setup price cards for each of our customer groups—the district, county government and local nonprofits—to automatically price jobs appropriately.”

Volusia wasn’t new to digital workflows, they just needed more capabilities.

Volusia County Schools went from hardcopy to digital job submission in 2002 and had a proprietary under-supported print manager for many years. “I’ve been here for 27 years,” explains Shepherd. “I remember when our back office was full of bins that were overflowing with three-part forms.” Even with a digital system, the copy center still couldn’t bill for specialty jobs or handle large paper sizes. Customers were often frustrated when trying to submit jobs during peak periods, this is why they implemented WebCRD and QDirect in 2016.

Greater functionality for users and staff makes all the difference.

One key advantage of WebCRD for users is that they can see the cost of their job up front. The copy center offers a 10% discount if users don’t change the default due date and they can see the cost difference right in their shopping cart when building the job. They also have newfound freedom to print more than one job at a time and assemble multiple documents into one using the WebCRD Book Assembly module.

“I like that I can proxy a user to help them submit jobs correctly,” adds Shepherd. “Today, a customer submitted a letter size job, but the input materials were legal size. I could log in and help them adjust their ticket. And I love that we now have single sign-on. We used to have to field at least 50 calls a week to change passwords for customers who forgot theirs; especially after summers, which is already our busiest time. Now they’re automatically signed in to WebCRD once they sign into the network.”

More Capabilities and Streamlined Printing.

Volusia was thrilled that QDirect’s interface looked similar to their old system. WebCRD gave them access to many more capabilities such as automated report building and delivery to a representative at each customer location with totals of their print usage, which used to be done by hand. QDirect also has hot folders to automate print management. “We didn’t have hot folders before,” says Shepherd. “Report cards are one of our biggest and of course most important jobs. Users used to have to go onto the system, download the report, and then file and print the report to us. Now it simply goes into a hot folder.”

Job submissions are more accurate now, as well. Users used to often order two-sided standard instead of two- sided calendar for example, and the job wouldn’t flip properly. “With the hot folders we can now get 130,000 pages, set up properly, in a matter of minutes,” explains Shepherd. “This saves time at every location; our old system would back up because everyone was trying to print at same time. With our old print manager, if you sent a batch of jobs to the printer you had to wait until they all went to a printer before you could send more work. Now we can send jobs to all printers simultaneously. There are days we receive 10,000 jobs and we can’t be waiting for a batch of jobs to go through to one printer. Now QDirect sends simultaneously to all of the printers perfectly.”

More reliable support and training is another new difference.

Volusia’s old print manager was under serviced. Now they have access to knowledgeable and responsive service and support 24/7. “Our night shift employees confirm that when they call, even in the middle of the night, RSA is quick to respond,” says Shepherd. “They get back to us right away and are professional and helpful.”

© 2018 Rochester Software Associates, Inc. All brands and product names are registered trademarks of their respective companies. 2/2018