In-plant Praised on TV News

Chelle Palmer was going about her day at the Richland School District Print Shop, in Richland, Wash., last month when the phone rang. It was local TV station KNDO. They wanted to send over a TV crew to do a story about her in-plant—in 15 minutes.

“I had no time to prepare,” says Palmer, manager of the three-employee shop.

KNDO had heard that the in-plant had set a new record by printing 3.5 million copies in September, almost twice its usual monthly output.

“We average about two million copies a month,” Palmer notes. “So the 3.5 million was a much higher volume, but not unreasonable for startup of the school year.”

The TV news segment noted that because the in-plant’s cost per copy is low, it saves the district tens of thousands of dollars. This is the type of positive PR every in-plant would love to get. And it basically fell right into Palmer’s lap.

“I had sent an e-mail out to our staff about many things,” she recalls—including a note of thanks to teachers and faculty for using the scanners on their walk-up copiers to send jobs to the in-plant, instead of printing them themselves.

“So I mentioned how many copies we did for startup [of the school year], and our communications director...wrote up a little something on our Web page.” KNDO spotted that and ran with it.

“The story was a great boost for the print shop,” Palmer says, though she admits she would have liked more time to prepare.

All of the district’s schools have copiers equipped with scanning software from Rochester Software Associates that lets teachers send digital files directly to the in-plant, where they are quickly printed on the in-plant’s five Xerox D125s and a DocuColor 252.

“Our standard rule is, if you scan it to us by 1:00 pm you will have it in the mail by 6:00 am the next morning,” she says, though since mail is picked up at 3:30, jobs must actually be completed by then. Palmer says 81 percent of teachers now utilize this program.

“We’re giving back their time,” she noted in the KNDO news segment. “They have time to really plan for their classes instead of standing in front of a copy machine, making copies for what they’re going to teach. It’s giving their planning period back to them.”