OVERLAND PARK, Kan. and NORWALK, Conn -- A scan-to-print shop solution created for a Kansas school district by Xerox Corporation has reinvented the print center into a high-tech teaching tool, allowing teachers and staff to spend more time promoting education and less time preparing materials.
 
Previously, tests, reading packets and study worksheets at the Blue Valley School District were transferred through interoffice mail to the print center to be copied, taking up to four days for an order to be completed. Needing a faster turnaround, many teachers and staff opted to print these medium- to high-volume jobs on the nearest multifunction printer (MFP), taking them away from the classroom or their normal support duties and ultimately costing the district more money.
 
With Xerox Extensible Interface Platform™-enabled MFPs along with QDirect.SCAN™ software and the WebCRD™ portal from Rochester Software Associates (RSA), a Xerox Alliance Partner, turnaround times have been cut in half and the number of orders to the district’s print center has doubled.
 
District personnel can access scan-to-print shop from Xerox WorkCentre® 5600 and WorkCentre 7655 color MFPs across the district’s 31 schools and administrative buildings. Teachers submit jobs directly by scanning the original document to the print center from the MFP. They specify ticketing options for the print center, such as the number of copies, single or double-sided, and billing codes, when they scan the document. A one-page order confirmation prints out on the MFP with their selections and a thumbnail proof of the first four pages of the order.
 
Jobs are sent to the district’s print center, where they are produced on a high-volume production device such as the Xerox 4112™ Enterprise Printing and Xerox Nuvera® 144 EA Production Systems. All jobs can be archived in WebCRD, which creates a streamlined workflow that allows for easy reordering without the time and hassle of locating the hard copy original.
 
“Faculty and staff were spending significant time producing documents in their buildings. In fact, only about 25 percent of the district’s black-and-white digital print volume was coming from the print center,” said Jason Gillam, assistant director of business operations, Blue Valley School District. “This unique system has increased the volume of the print center without having to take on new staff, and our staff now has more time to focus on teaching and learning.”
 
The district’s business office is also using Xerox DocuShare®, a Web-based enterprise content management system, and software from WaterWare Internet Services, Inc., to more efficiently process the district’s vendor contracts and renewals. Contracts are scanned into the MFP and transferred to DocuShare. A custom collection in DocuShare is used to collect the pertinent information about the contract, like expiration dates and vendor names. The software then monitors when contract renewal dates are approaching and automatically notifies employees via e-mail with specific instructions about the expiring contract and next steps. Employees are able to instantly access the contract they need in DocuShare, reducing the district’s dependence on hard copy contracts, and increasing the speed of retrieving information.