Universities are under pressure to find savings and cut costs. Departments that can’t demonstrate profitability or a plan for how they will achieve it are at risk of closure.
Print can be a commercially successful operation - there are successful commercial printers all over the UK - but many university print rooms struggle to break even. This can be because of underinvestment or a lack of awareness within the organisation of what the print room can do.
Financial directors tasked with cutting costs may see closing the print room as an opportunity to make savings, but this is often a false economy. The money that’s saved is then spent on third-party print providers, which ends up being more expensive in the long run. They have simply moved the cost from part of the balance sheet to another, and increased it.
Thankfully, there is another way.
By investing strategically, identifying new customers and building new routes to market, you can turn your print facility into a successful operation that can more than cover its own costs. Resulting in a viable, profit-making department.
This document will walk you through Ricoh’s Roadmap to a Profitable Print Room, a six-step journey that will take you from cost centre to profit centre.
It’s not about buying new equipment, it’s about shifting the mindset from fulfilling requests to proactively generating demand and behaving like a commercial operation.
We’re proud to have helped a range of print rooms within the UK higher education sector achieve profitability in this way, including Cambridge Regional College, University of Sunderland, Croydon College and University of Leeds.
If you have any questions on anything in this document or would like to discuss how we could help, feel free to get in touch.
Richard Mason, Production Print Sales Director CRD, Ricoh UK
