Business News

Noel-Baker Community School and Language College Invests in Ricoh Pro C720s to Expand Print Room Operation

Friday 27. August 2010 - Derby-based Noel-Baker School and Language College, is reaping the benefits of investing in a Ricoh Pro C720s light production digital colour printer. Through its investment, the school, which replaced a 45 page per minute (ppm) multifunctional colour printer (MFP) with the 72 ppm Pro C720s, has transformed its internal print operation by increasing productivity, reducing lead times and offering an enhanced professional colour printing service to other schools and organisations within the area.

Joe Nutman, Reprographics Commercial Manager is responsible for the School’s centralised print room, which provides a printing service to on-site staff, as well as supporting external organisations. He says: “Moving from a colour MFP, to a faster, professional light production print system has been hugely beneficial for us. The Pro C720s is easy to use and maintain, offers colour printing at a competitive price, is more time efficient and is also capable of handling much higher volumes. The machine is extremely reliable and you can set a job to print, walk away and leave it to run, which allows us to complete other tasks. With the Pro C720s, we’ve also been able to use a much wider range of media including coated silk and gloss papers, matt and recycled stock and the results are outstanding.”



Prior to its Ricoh Pro C720s investment, the print room was handling more black and white print jobs than colour. Demand for colour printing, including prospectuses, within the school was high, and the legacy device was struggling, which resulted in many print and print finishing jobs being outsourced at a substantial cost. Mr Nutman continues: “We were unable to meet demand, both internally and from external customers for high quality colour. We had reached a point where we had to make a decision to invest in new equipment or to cease offering a commercial print service to external organisations altogether.”



The School met with Ricoh and considered upgrading its MFP for a new model, however, on being shown the new Pro C720, it was this machine which met all the school’s requirements and has since impacted on the print room’s reputation and ability to win new business and manage that new business in-house.



Mr Nutman concludes: “The Pro C720s has ticked all the boxes in terms of size and cost, plus its ability to handle a wider range of media stock and sizes has enabled us to deliver professional quality work for a wider customer base. The demand for high quality has always been there, we just couldn’t meet it, but now we can now produce the highest quality colour in-house for a fraction of what it was costing to outsource, and we’re now doing more work in less time. For the past two years large volumes were outsourced at substantial cost and that has now changed. Last year we took on a healthy amount of new business from external customers, however with the Pro C720s on board, we’re confident we will increase this significantly as we now have the capacity in-house to meet a growing demand.”