Getting one or two new pieces of equipment is nothing out of the ordinary for an in-plant. But installing more than 10 machines at once? That’s a bit more unusual. But that is exactly what Omaha Public Schools has done.
Nikki Hiller, administrator of Printing, Publications and Mail for the Omaha, Nebraska, district, notes that when she took over the department in 2023, she was told the in-plant would be moving into a new and larger facility — in an old biscuit factory.
“It was the old U.S. Mills building,” she notes. “We didn’t have to worry about making sure the floors could support the weight.”
As she looked at all the space the in-plant would have available — twice as much as its previous facility — Hiller started thinking beyond just the move. She took a hard look at all the print work the district was outsourcing, then determined what equipment the shop would need to acquire to bring all those jobs back in-house, along with the savings it would bring to the district.
“It was everything,” she says. “Signage, ADA, wayfinding — my big thing was trying to do the consumables [homework sheets, student workbooks, etc.], so letting the district order the textbooks, but letting us print the consumables so we wouldn’t have that much waste. The transportation wouldn’t be difficult. The logistics of getting it to the school wouldn’t be difficult. And if five more students came, instead of housing all of that, we could have that opportunity [to print on demand.]”
Into the New Facility
In May, the 13-employee in-plant completed its move into the new 30,000-sq.-ft. temperature- and humidity-controlled facility. The arsenal of newly installed equipment would make any in-plant jealous:
- Two Kyocera TASKalfa Pro 15000c inkjet presses
- Riso Velezus T2200 inkjet press with inline Tecnau roll-to-cut and perf
- Ricoh Pro C9500
- Canon Arizona 1360 GTF flatbed wide-format printer with roll option
- Canon Colorado M5W Pro wide-format printer
- Colex flatbed cutter
- Duplo DC-648 slitter/cutter/creaser
- Duplo DC-516 Pro Multi-Finisher
- Quadient DS-700iQ folder/inserter
- C.P. Bourg BB3102 perfect binder with Challenge CMT 330
And Hiller isn’t done yet. “In our busiest time, which is usually July into October, we have every school and teacher that submits all their orders through us. And even with the new machines, we still had difficulty keeping up with that many orders,” she reports. “So I will need more, and I’m working on it. I’m purchasing probably a couple more things.”…