Reprographics/Print Room

[Iain.Faulkner]

Morning all,

 

We are looking to revamp our resources/reprographics/print room at the end of our lease next summer.

 

One of the things we are keen to do is to be able to offer out the facilities to the local community and run it as a bit of a business.

 

Does anyone else do anything similar? Would anyone mind letting me know what they offer to people in terms of what they produce (do you produce glossy prospectus', vinyl banners, flyers etc for example)? What devices do you have?

 

Thanks in advance

 

Iain

[psydii]

We have a number of local community groups who use our facilities. We have a couple of Polaris series devices from sharp, so have the capability to produce quite high quality copy.

 

They have access to our big laminators, binders, collations and binding facilities too. To be honest they are a rounding error in the reprographics account.

 

To make use of anything beyond basic photocopying the end user has to have some skills not commonly found in the general population. The volume of interest we see from potential external users doesn't warrant the provision of the reprographics technician out of normal hours to support them, and in general the volume and nature of internal work precludes community work during the day.

[TechMonkey]

Purely my opinion but I'm not sure it would work as a business, just knowing what pressure full time printers are under. Maybe offering to local primaries would be an option? Either at cost or with a small surcharge on? Otherwise I could see it becoming more trouble than it is worth, what if a rush job comes in but mock exam papers need to be printed, who gets priority the money maker or the core business?

 

I would say the focus should be on the benefit it brings to the school, being able to whip up event banners or posters to spruce the school up is something I am looking into for our site.

[Iain.Faulkner]

Purely my opinion but I'm not sure it would work as a business, just knowing what pressure full time printers are under. Maybe offering to local primaries would be an option? Either at cost or with a small surcharge on? Otherwise I could see it becoming more trouble than it is worth, what if a rush job comes in but mock exam papers need to be printed, who gets priority the money maker or the core business?

 

I would say the focus should be on the benefit it brings to the school, being able to whip up event banners or posters to spruce the school up is something I am looking into for our site.

 

No I think you're right, I think that by providing additional functionality to the school we can save some money by not having to have banners etc produced externally. But the questions/issues you raise are very valid and they are things that would have to be answered before we began to offer out services externally.

[Willott]

I've looked at the possibility of producing more glossy/promo type things in house, and the cost of doing so seems to be higher than going through external companies - with the volumes big print shops do, they can buy in the resources much cheaper than I could readily find them (biggest cost appeared to be paper when I was comparing for brochure type things). Of course, you may find differently, and if you do, I'd be interested in seeing on which aspects and devices you look at.