Customer Profile: State University of New York – Oneonta

SUNY Oneonta is a four-year liberal arts college that was founded in 1889. It is nestled in the hills of Central New York with approximately 5,900 students.

Barry Haney has been the Print Shop Supervisor at SUNY-Oneonta for about 5 years. The university’s in-plant print operation serves approximately 700 on-site faculty and staff members, plus another SUNY campus, for which they complete the jobs and arrange delivery via a local courier. The print shop has a staff of 3 full-time employees, and produces between 400 to 700 print jobs monthly.

Since implementing the hosted Print Shop Pro^® (PSP) solution late last year, the university has been able to achieve 100% online order submission. Walk-ins now use the computer kiosk set up in the shop to submit print requests through Print Shop Pro^® Webdesk.

When we asked Barry if he would be willing to do a quick interview for an article in edu News, he quickly responded with “Sure! I’ll promote this product all day long!”

Barry shared that prior to implementing PSP, his customers filled out an online print request form that was a flat submission form. It did not have any job tracking or automated billing functionality. Customers either emailed the completed request form to the shop or sent it through campus mail. Once received, the print shop staff had to print out the request form so it could travel along with the job through production. They had to manually calculate job costs and, on occasions when estimates were requested, place phone calls to the customer to provide job costs.

Prior to implementing PSP, Barry also had to deal with a manual billing procedure that could take anywhere from 4 to 5 days to complete. At the end of each month, he had to enter job details into Quicken and then transfer that information into an Excel spreadsheet provided by the Budget Office.

He would then email the completed spreadsheet back to the Budget Office so they could complete the charge back process. This was time consuming, and lacked the tracking and reporting capabilities needed to effectively manage the workflow.

After completing the billing process, Barry had to go back through the stack of papers to review the specs of each job and figure out how long it took them to complete each job. He knew he needed a print management system that could provide the reporting capabilities he needed so he could eliminate this time consuming and tedious effort. “This is time I now get to spend on the floor to help improve our production time.”

Barry was impressed during the presentation with edu’s ability to clarify what his exact needs were and then demonstrate how PSP would be capable of meeting those needs. Additionally, there were challenges with the previous email process. Customers would receive an email advising them that their print request was submitted, but the print shop had never received their request. With PSP, they have not had a single incident where submitted jobs were not received.

Barry evaluated several web-to-print solutions, and participated in a number of product demonstrations. He chose PSP because it had a user-friendly customer interface and was a cost effective solution. He also wanted to work with a vendor that offered a high level of customer support, assistance and guidance through the set up and implementation phases.

The university’s IT group made the recommendation of going with the cloud-based solution. They felt that it was a better approach since he would need to pay for internal IT resources and server space anyway. An added plus was that he would not have to wait on IT to install updates. Barry was happy to take their advice, stating, “That’s one less worry that I have.”

Barry felt the installation, implementation and training process all went very well. “I received all the help I needed! Anyone without a computer background or IT skills can be successful in setting up this program. Once I provided the requested information, edu imported the data and then I just made a few tweaks.”

The PSP store catalog function has really simplified the ordering process for college catalogs, calendars, and lots of other items they have set up in the store. Barry feels the store function of PSP has gone a long way in making the ordering process much easier for their customers. The entire print shop staff have been pleasantly surprised by the added benefits and improved fulfillment capabilities.

The customers have embraced the new online ordering system. Many have expressed that they feel PSP is extremely user-friendly. Barry said they simply put out a memo introducing the new store front and customers were able to log in and successfully enter print requests on their own. There were a few questions to answer, but they didn’t receive any customer complaints at all!

Barry is happy to speak with other in-plants to share his experiences with PSP and edu Business Solutions as a vendor, stating, “Implementing Print Shop Pro® is the best thing we’ve ever done. We love it!”