Arizona State University

Quotes

“As an educational facility that functions without benefit of any external or internal funding --other than that which we generate by providing a valuable service to ASU faculty and staff -- our department heads are really blown away by the speed and efficiency gains we’ve made within GIS,” added Skoglund. “We are now able to produce the work with better profitability, while offering products and services that meet or exceed the work that is done by outside vendors.

Profit Center Profits

"We’re bringing more production jobs into GIS Online, such as brochures, membership cards, posters and signage, direct mailers, booklets, newsletters and other marketing materials. Our goal is to eventually have virtually all of GIS’s jobs produced via GIS Online.
The more we do, the easier it gets,and now we are not spending so much of our time doing non-revenueproducing paperwork.”

GIS Director Mike Chiricuzio

“ASU demonstrates an outstanding use of Press-sense iWay in an in-plant environment. We are delighted that we were able to help Cathy revitalize ASU’s print shop into her vision of an efficient and highly automated production facility.”

Bob Nista, Co-founder of Cohesion Inc.

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	ASU case study

Background

Established in 1885 as the Arizona Normal School, Arizona State University (ASU) has an enrollment of over 61,000, and is ranked as one of the top 100 universities in the world by the Institute of Higher Education. This places ASU with the elite, including Harvard, Stanford,Yale, UC Berkeley, MIT and Princeton. Currently there are almost 260,000 living alumni worldwide who proudly call ASU their alma mater.

The Challenges

Cathy Skoglund (a 1996 ASU graduate with a degree in graphic communications) joined as the new Manager of Operations and Business Development for GIS in June of 2006.
“We desperately needed a workflow that provided both substantial organization tools, as well as a means of reporting and analysis,” noted Skoglund. “Our lack of structure and organization had resulted in turnaround times that were not acceptable. Campus clients, who often put jobs up for bid, were increasingly going off-campus to local commercial printers and digital service providers. To bring the program up to its mission-stated standards we needed to make significant changes, and those changes came in large part from the proper implementation and usage of Press-sense’s iWay.”

Implementation

Skoglund immediately began a crash course on best practices for utilizing iWay and began implementing the new workflow into GIS’s daily operation. “Like teaching bicyclists to drive a car, many of our clients, as well as our own staffers, had to overcome their basic fear of the new and different. But as soon as they saw how easy and organized it made production jobs flow, they were sold.” Within a very short time, GIS announced that they would no longer accept business cards the old fashion way. “It was a small step with the most basic of printing jobs, but critical in converting us over to an efficient and productive workflow,” she noted. “We branded the new workflow ‘GIS Online’ and by the September deadline we were 100% online with business cards. A month later we began to implement letterheads, envelopes and other template based products. Soon, all business system orders will go through GIS Online.”

The Numbers

295 department clients set up online.
1-12 different users per department, and growing daily.
Job turnaround, once estimated to be between 3 weeks and 2 months, has dropped to 2-3 days.
Compared to 10-20 jobs per day the department regularly received last June (2006), today, GIS receives anywhere from 25 to 45 orders per day through “GIS Online” alone.

The Benefits

“There are many positive aspects of iWay. For GIS, iWay enables us to set up a queue and gang jobs for maximum efficiency in production. Using iWay’s Layout Maker, we group similar jobs into one. Layout Maker figures out the imposition and number of sheets to print so we can minimize waste. And, iWay’s ability to create a job ticket makes our job flow even faster by providing four separate sheets including production, finishing, delivery, and pricing information. The pricing information sheet goes directly to accounting so we can bill clients as we are finishing production, which allows us to have better cashflow.”