Wide-Format Device Lets Engineering Department
Digitize Documents, Save Money
February 3, 2009 - For five
years, the engineering department of Morgan County, Alabama (AL) printed its
documents, such as road and bridge plans and maps, on a Xerox 2510 Engineering
Wide Format Copier, which the county purchased at a government auction.
However, when Xerox launched a new generation product and stopped supporting
the device and employees began to request a networked device that could print
in color, the county set out to acquire a new wide format product. It sent out
bids to three Alabama-based vendors, and awarded the bid to Alabama Graphics of
Birmingham because it offered the lowest price of the three vendors. The
engineering department purchased a KIP 3100 device that features color scanning
and monochrome copying and printing. The county also purchased a color plotter,
which allows the county to print and copy documents in color, and a stacker,
along with an extended three-year warranty and service agreement, for a total
of $35,585.
New Capability Frontier
According to Greg Bodley,
senior engineer for Morgan County, the county purchased the plotter, the
ink-jet HP Designjet T1100PS printer, because it would have cost twice as much
to purchase a single unit that included color copying and printing. “Our color
requirements were increasing,” explained Bodley. “We receive subdivision plans
from developers and engineers and we need to make copies of them to review and
mark-up with red lines. We prefer to print the final sets of plans, which
contain modifications, in color because it clearly shows the changes as
indicated by the red lines,” noted Bodley.
The county also required a
full-size scanner to digitize documents. “The county has over 1,000 rolls worth
of documents that will take a couple of years to digitize,” said Bodley.
Whereas the county used to send certain types of work to a print shop, the
reduction/enlargement feature on the KIP 3100 now allows the county to reduce
documents and print them in-house onto letter- or legal-size media. One
specification that the vendors absolutely had to meet was that users be able to
scan documents at the device and send them to the plotter (for making color
copies), rather than having to go back to their desks and scan them from their
PCs.
Bodley said that of the new
unit’s features and capabilities, he believes that color copying is the most
important to the four staff members who use the device. The staff members use
CAD and GIS (software used by engineers to map roads and streets) applications
to create engineering plans used by in-house staff.
Purchase Preference
The county decided to
purchase rather than lease because funds were available and, according to Bodley,
the county is notorious for getting the most life out of purchased equipment.
“We held onto the Xerox 2510 for five years, which was a used device and which
Xerox stopped providing support for two of the five years we owned it,” said
Bodley. He said that the county, under the terms of the service agreement, can
produce up to 10,500 square feet of documents per quarter. If the county
exceeds that amount (which Bodley does not expect to), it will pay an overage
charge of 2.1¢ for each square foot.
Bodley said that prior to
submitting bids, the county asked for input from staff members regarding the
types of features that would help them in their work. “The one feature that got
a resounding and emphatic request was color copying, which we made sure to include
in the bid,” Bodley said. Angela Mullican, office administrator for Morgan County, said that the staff has been very pleased with the KIP 3100 wide-format
device in the three months that it has been using the product. One particular
feature that Mullican likes is that if paper becomes skewed as it is feeding
through the device, the scanner will stop the job. “Some users may be annoyed
because they have to rescan their jobs, but I think that’s better than crumpled
paper going through the machine.”
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