Customer Profile: Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University

Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University is the world’s largest, fully accredited university specializing in aviation and aerospace. They have campuses located in Daytona Beach. Florida and Prescott, Arizona as well as online courses that serve students from around the world. Embry-Riddle has been at the forefront of ground-breaking aeronautical milestones since the early days of flight

Ask Rex Dietrich of Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University why he purchased a print shop management system and he will tell you, “To save time and increase efficiency.” Ask him why he purchased Print Shop Pro^® and he will tell you, “Print Shop Pro^® was designed for in-plant print shops. We didn’t have to try and fool a program designed for a commercial organization into working within a non-profit organization.”

Rex spent about a year looking for a management system for his five-employee print shop and found that most off-the-shelf programs were geared toward commercial shops. He didn’t have the time to build a program from the ground up and purchasing a customized program was too expensive.

edu Business Solutions and Embry-Riddle formed a partnership. A partnership that provided Embry-Riddle with the “customized” system they were looking for (without the customized price), and provided edu with a valuable software development partner.

Rex’s shop supports about 5,000 full-time residential students as well as over 24,000 students enrolled in one of the 140 Embry-Riddle Extended Campus distance-learning centers on US military bases all over the world. The shop produces about 650-700 jobs per month and supports over 1,000 departments.

Automated Reports

Embry-Riddle relies on reports to manage their shop and produces a variety of daily, weekly, monthly and annual reports. The management system they chose needed to do two things: automate report production, and be versatile enough to produce custom reports to meet their unique needs.

Print Shop Pro^® fit the bill. By automating report production, time intensive tasks such as redundant keystrokes and maintaining multiple log books are eliminated. This is especially important to Karen Rose, Job Coordinator at Embry-Riddle. She manages all print jobs and report production and is looking forward to experiencing the time-saving benefits of Print Shop Pro^®’s report capabilities first-hand. Karen will be the main operator of Print Shop Pro^® and has been very involved in getting the program set-up in Embry-Riddle’s print shop. Print Shop Pro^® has also proven to be versatile enough to create the daily crosscharge reports that Embry-Riddle sends to their accounting department on a daily basis.

In addition, Print Shop Pro^® provides reports to help Embry-Riddle make important decisions regarding production, job type, customer analysis and equipment volumes. For example, analyzing the equipment volume report is a useful tool for making future equipment purchases.

Does this sound familiar? All departmental employees can submit print jobs, but only a budget manager can approve jobs. Embry-Riddle wanted to make the move to an online customer job submission program, but didn’t know how the approval routing process would work on the web. They found their solution in Webdesk. Together with Embry-Riddle, edu developed a solution that would enable Print Shop Pro^® Webdesk to manage the approval routing process online. Here’s how it works. When a job is submitted by a print shop customer, the budget manager receives an email notifying them that a job is pending for their approval. The budget manager reviews the job and once it is approved, the job is released to the print shop and production begins. This solution is quick, easy, seamless and 100% electronic. Once the roll-out is complete, Embry-Riddle anticipates that about 4050% of their customers will use Webdesk regularly.

The partnership between edu Business Solutions and Embry-Riddle has been very beneficial—providing Embry-Riddle with a solution designed specifically for in-plants and edu Business Solutions with a valuable development partner.