Ithaca Offers More Services to More Customers with WebCRD

• Print Case Study

Customer Background/Solutions Overview

Ithaca College is situated in Upstate New York with almost 7,000 students and almost 2,000 faculty and staff on campus. The campus print center includes five employees producing course packs, tests, quizzes for faculty as well as recruiting and marketing materials such as post cards, flyers, residential life posters, brochures and wide format outputs for staff. “Our role on campus is clear,” says Peter Kilcoyne, Manager or Print Production Operations. “We’re here to support faculty, staff and students with high-quality printed communications with quick turnarounds at a low cost.” The Ithaca College print center began using WebCRD to manage workflow in 2013. Today they operate a two digital presses, a black and white press, two wide format printers and dye sublimation. Automating and optimizing their workflow has accelerated turnaround time, improved accuracy and enabled them to provide services to a wider group of clients in the Ithaca community without adding staff.

From Hardcopy to Cutting Edge Workflow Overnight

“Before WebCRD, all our work orders were hand-written and arrived through intercampus mail,” explains Glen Harris, Digital & Prepress Specialist. “Today, we use WebCRD’s AutoFlowTM to automatically take in jobs 24/7. We can then route them to best printer for the job and eliminate touches.”

This digital workflow has greatly improved the work environment for the Print Center and its customers at the beginning of each semester on campus. The print center used to have a no-vacation policy for two weeks at the beginning of Classes and experienced a tremendous rise in overtime as professors made last minute changes to their course materials. With WebCRD all the panic has been replaced by smoother scheduling and faster turnarounds. And with the ability to quickly and accurately apply chargebacks to the appropriate cost centers, hours and hours of weekend work have been eliminated all year long.

A Former Customer of the Printer Center Now Oversees its Current Strengths

“I am the print buyer for the college as well as overseeing the print center so I know how much WebCRD has improved our workflow,” explains Peter Kilcoyne. Most turnarounds used to be 5-7 days. Now they are less than 3-5 days. Jobs used to be held to make sure the output matched the hand-written work orders. Now it’s all automatic and jobs go through prepress same day and are usually available the next day.” Plus, users see an online proof of their job before they submit it. And because 99% of work is submitted digitally, online, without hard copy scanning or work orders, ticketing is more accurate and image quality is greatly improved.

The current workflow provides an online catalog for customers to select jobs such as ordering their own stationery and provides the Print Center employees with instant, accurate job tracking. Without needing to track down a physical receipt, they know instantly where each job is in the process.

Taking the Print Center to a Wider Audience

Before WebCRD, almost all work done by the Print Center was for the campus itself. Today more and more customers are coming from the greater Ithaca community, including materials for area nonprofits and short run commercial jobs that can be more cost-effectively delivered by Ithaca College than local commercial printers directly. The efficiency the Print Center has gained in their workflow has enabled the school to provide these income-generating services to the Ithaca community without adding staff.

Going forward, the Print Center wants to add more off-campus work and more services to all of their customers. They aim to expand their dye sublimation work, for example. “We’ve seen tremendous return on our investment in this technology and print capabilities,” says Glen Harris. “Our name tag printing alone has more than paid for the printer. Today, customers can submit orders for name tags online and we can print them for 75% less than what we were paying in the past.”

© 2017 Rochester Software Associates, Inc. All brands and product names are registered trademarks of their respective companies. 07/2017