Focus

September 2008

Vol. 7 Issue 1

Pressing business

Multifaceted Print Shop makes money, serves District

Mike Ortiz does not run a quiet shop.

And that's the way he likes it. It's the hubbub of activity at the Tucson Unified School District's Print Shop that have turned it into a money-making operation after years of operating in the red. As the shop manager, Ortiz has solicited new business, added services and used its profits to invest in equipment. Within the district, the print shop has won the right of first refusal. If jobs can be done more cheaply outside the Print Shop, it will be contracted.

"We now try to keep 99 percent of the jobs in house so the money stays in the district," Ortiz, who is a 1971 Pueblo High School graduate, explained. "If it exceeds our capabilities on specialty things, like pens and pocket folders, then it's sent out."

The shop at 325 N. Euclid Ave. keeps its 11 employees busy doing press work, bindery, and graphics. Instead of being specialized, the staff is cross trained on the equipment.

Print shop services include:

• Buttons: The 3-inch custom made buttons have various uses such as school visitor tags, hall passes, students of the week, honor rolls and monitor identifications. No minimum is required to produce the buttons on two non-motorized machines. One person can produce a button a minute.
• School yearbooks: Elementary school yearbooks run the gamut from stapled copies featuring hand drawn covers to digitally produced publications. Ortiz said the print shop focuses on keeping the books affordable so than even multiple children in a family can each have a copy. Ortiz and his staff conduct field trips and career day tours, where they explain the jobs available at a print shop.
• Letters for mailing: The new Hasler Model 7000 collates, folds, inserts letters into envelopes and addresses envelopes with ink type. It does the work of 14 to 15 people, depending on the size of the job. Another machine, the HJ710, seals 9,000 envelopes in an hour.
• Signs: The Epson 9800 large format printer, purchased last year, prints on vinyl, adhesive backed vinyl or canvas. It has produced hundreds of signs in the last year with the first three jobs paying for the machine. The Print Shop charges $6.50 per square foot, compared to outside businesses charging $8 to $10. Plus the Print Shop doesn't charge sales tax, Ortiz said.
• Presses: The print shop has five offset presses that handle color and large volume black-and-white jobs. The large format Epson printer can output projects 44 inch wide by up to 40 feet long in eight colors that are weather- and fade-proof on vinyl and paper.
• Photocopiers: The 2-year-old digital color copier runs 50 copies per minute at a cost of 35 cents each on 8 1/2-by-11-inch paper to 65 cents for 11-by-17-inch copies. They also run 12-by-18 inch sizes for booklets. The pair of black-and-white digital copiers are used to make booklets at 110 copies per minute.
• Software: Ortiz uses a computer print management software program called Print Shop Pro that is designed for in-plant printing facilities. It allows staff to print out  work orders and it also does instantaneous billing, replacing the three- to four-day process previously required. The software also stores data, prints annual reports and stores the job histories.

      In about 18 months, Ortiz anticipates introducing a Web-based work submission process to dovetail with the Print Shop Pro. Work orders would travel to the Print Shop through the computer, becoming a print-on-demand system that would help with the warehouse, be more efficient and save money. This module would cost about $3,000.

In another development, the Print Shop has turned its darkroom into an office and a storeroom. The Print Shop now has an automated plate maker that uses polyester plates at a cost of $2 per plate, compared to $25 to $30 per plate in the old system that transferred a negative to a burned plate.

Ortiz also anticipates having a document conversion system that converts files into CD's with a new piece of equipment that has been ordered. That would mean keeping confidential material in house, a recommendation of the MGT audit.