Like any good in-plant manager, Kim Stanford hoped for the best but planned for the worst. Several years ago, the worst came in the form of a global pandemic.
With in-person instruction canceled at the University of Alaska Anchorage (UAA), production orders slowed to a crawl at Stanford’s in-plant. Call it preparation, call it luck but there was a bright spot for her five-employee production operation at this particularly bleak time — her in-plant’s fleet management program.
“The leases on our fleet equipment provided us revenue,” says Stanford, director of General Support Services at UAA. The modest upcharge the in-plant places on leases for its fleet of Kyocera devices meant the department still had some funds coming in when pages weren’t going out. And, surprisingly enough, “We did not get a single cancellation on our leases,” during the pandemic, Stanford says.
Almost a third of in-plants (32%) oversee copier fleet management programs, according to In-plant Impressions’ latest research report, “In-plant Capabilities, Performance, and Expansion (2026).” They tell us that managing their organizations’ fleets provides not only a revenue boost but an opportunity to increase their value while driving more print work to the in-plant. It’s a lesson Stanford learned a long time ago…