Shift to Production Inkjet Saves Texas Schools 60%
For Amy Palmer, adjusting to a new inkjet press was hardly the toughest challenge for her in-plant this year. In June, she learned her three-employee print operation at the Region 7 Education Service Center, in Kilgore, Texas, would have to pack up and move due to construction. This meant coordinating with four equipment vendors to relocate equipment – with the move finishing up while Palmer was away attending the In-plant Printing and Mailing Association (IPMA) conference.
“It was a little crazy,” Palmer laughs, her cheerful demeanor not dimmed in the slightest. “We’re just living out of boxes right now.”
Fortunately, one of the easiest pieces to move was the in-plant’s new Riso ComColor GL7430 inkjet printer, which rolled smoothly down the hall into its temporary home and plugged right into a 110-volt outlet. Purchased with an in-line perfect binder, the GL7430 has been staying very busy since it was installed in October 2024.
Amy Palmer
“The Riso was just the perfect fit for what we need,” says Palmer, Printing Services Technician II.
The shop primarily uses it to print curriculum and training materials for the Region 7 Education Service Center, which serves 95 school districts and seven charter schools in East Texas, helping them improve student performance. The in-line perfect binder – a new capability for the in-plant – lets it produce thicker books, sometimes up to 500 pages, Palmer says. She praises the uptime of the Riso GL7430.
“It’s kind of our little workhorse,” she says. “I tell everyone it will probably be here longer than I am.”
The shop has been putting it through its paces this summer, printing about 150,000 impressions with it in July and even more in August.
The in-plant’s path to inkjet started when Palmer noticed black-and-white volumes dropping after COVID and decided to replace a monochrome printer with a color machine. The shop now runs a Konica Minolta AccurioPress C4080 and a Ricoh Pro C7500 with an in-line GBC punch. When black-and-white pages later rebounded, she found that printing them on the color machines was too pricy, so she had to outsource the work.
Then Palmer attended an IPMA Road Show and talked with Riso representatives. The low price per page of Riso inkjet printers impressed her. That feeling solidified after she attended the Inkjet Summit, where she listened closely to the experiences of other inkjet users.
“Those case studies were phenomenal,” she praises.
Though the in-plant added the Riso GL7430 to print black-and-white pages, Palmer quickly realized the Riso’s color output was better than expected.
“We’re doing a lot more color than we thought [we would],” she says.
Customers love the cost savings of inkjet.
“We’re at a 60% savings for them if they print on the Riso, and we fully expect when we get to do a full year of analysis that we may be able to even take the price down a little bit lower,” Palmer says.
So far, the in-plant is keeping up with the demand in its temporary facility, but Palmer eagerly anticipates the completion of the shop’s new 2,000-sq.-ft. shop in March 2026. She worked with Ricoh Professional Services to create a shop floor layout for the new facility. After that, Palmer sees some additional inkjet expansion in the in-plant’s future.
“Within the next three to five years, I do think we’ll have an inkjet in here that’s replacing a [toner] production machine,” she says.
Bob has served as editor of In-plant Impressions since October of 1994. Prior to that he served for three years as managing editor of Printing Impressions, a commercial printing publication. Mr. Neubauer is very active in the U.S. in-plant industry. He attends all the major in-plant conferences and has visited 200 in-plant operations around the world. He has given presentations to numerous in-plant groups in the U.S., Canada and Australia, including the Association of College and University Printers and the In-plant Printing and Mailing Association. He also coordinates the annual In-Print contest, co-sponsored by IPMA and In-plant Impressions.
