Streamlining production and saving costs by bringing printing back
in-house

For more than 20 years, the University of Mons in Belgium has offered students and teachers a repro shop on campus to produce course material and an affordable photocopy service.

However, due to the rise in paper and energy prices as well as paper, ink and energy waste, the university wanted to gain better control over its procurement costs and decided to bring all print jobs, that had been until then, outsourced to third party printers, back in-house.

One of the University of Mons’ main requirements when bringing print back in-house was to enhance the quality of its monochrome documents using digital printing, to be on par with the quality of print produced using monochrome offset.

The university also wanted to introduce digital colour printing to produce all the university’s colour documents in-house digitally that offered a print quality that matched what external print providers could deliver.

To meet their colour requirements, the University of Mons invested in two imagePRESS V1350 colour digital presses with toner technology as well as two high-volume varioPRINT 6180 TITAN toner-based systems to handle its monochrome jobs.

Investing in high-speed production equipment allowed University of Mons to scale up dramatically, moving from three million clicks a year to a million clicks a month.

A large part of this progression involves colour documents for which the print quality delivered by the imagePRESS V1350 fully meets the university’s requirements. Printing digitally ‘on demand’ also lets the team produce just the right quantities, substantially cutting down production costs.