Budget Buzz: Lessons Learned from K-12 School Print Centers

Blue Valley Schools in Kansas have a high volume print center that helps their district squeeze the most out of their budget dollars, offering services and innovative ways to deliver without adding staff. In an era of mandates and propositions, they have been able to give teachers back planning time and save the district precious resources.

Using WebCRD, QDirect and QDirect.SCAN, the print center has increased volume 735%, saves $100k in chargebacks per year, and saves teachers almost 50,000 hours annually. All without adding staff or increasing their budget.

In fact, Blue Valley Schools now processes over 1,000 orders a day during busy season and have a +20% production multiplier that enables lights out overnight printing using workflow automation (WebCRD AutoFlow™). Such workflow automation has freed up staff for high value duties and offering value-adding services like personalized student planners and year books that save the district even more. In the fall of 2013, they added the new ability to build custom textbooks and workbooks that enables district curriculum administrators to reassess how they purchase curriculum materials going forward, subsequently positioning the in-plant to become the "textbook" printer for the district, using WebCRD's Book Assembly module.