KING ALFRED'S COMMUNITY AND SPORTS COLLEGE WANTAGE GETS ITS COPIES RIGHT WITH PHOTOCOPIERS FROM COPY RIGHT

A thriving Community College that prides itself on providing the finest possible education to its students needs to know that it can rely on its reprographic resources. With a very busy dedicated reprographics department, King Alfred's needs a robust network of highly functional photocopiers and a reliable, flexible servicing partner to ensure that the machines deliver maximum up-time.

King Alfred's has approximately 1800 students from Wantage, Grove and the surrounding villages in Oxfordshire, and employs some 200 people. The College is currently based on three sites, with the Centre site housing the reprographics department. Further copying facilities are also located in each of the other two sites. The copiers are used to replicate course material, print information for students and parents and many other tasks, including work for the local community. Peter Thompson, Business Manager at the College, explains the importance of having a reliable reprographics resource: "We require photocopiers to a large degree to create course information and supporting materials for our staff and students. It's essential that we have access to powerful machines on an ad hoc basis and if we were not able to copy documents, for whatever reason, it would seriously impact on the smooth running of the College. We need to know that the machines we are using are reliable and user-friendly, and that the service company is efficient and responsive to our needs." Many years ago, the College decided that it would become more efficient by creating a central reprographics department to handle the bulk of its copying, and then deploying smaller scale copiers in necessary locations across the sites.

King Alfred's has worked in close partnership with all the people at Copy Right Systems for some fifteen years and turns to the company to install the right equipment in its reprographics department and throughout the College. Nigel Grainger, Director at Copy Right, explains the technology that the company has deployed: "We are fortunate that having partnerships with three of the leading manufacturers ensures we can install the best solution that will suit the work environment. In the main reprographics room we have installed a Ricoh Aficio 2090 with the dedicated booklet maker and trimmer, which copies at 90 pages per minute and is the main print room machine. This works alongside the powerful Kyocera KM 7530, a 75 cpm digital copier. Colour printing and copying is delivered by the top-of-the-range Sharp fiery-networked ARC 250N which copies and prints at 25 full colour pages per minute." For on-site facilities in the separate sites, Copy Right has opted to install multifunctional copiers from Kyocera: "The KM-5035 at 50 cpm is a highly reliable and very user-friendly copier with the option to add print, scan and fax functionality if required," explains Nigel, "it is an extremely compact unit and has recently won a top award from BERTL for reliability and functionality, making it ideal for the College's needs."

SERVICE AND SUPPORT
Graham Pointer, Service Director leads the service team that provides a guaranteed four-hour call out service response to the College in the event of a breakdown. Graham ensures that regular servicing and maintenance visits by the manufacture-trained engineers, keep the copier fleet in excellent working order. Business Manager Peter Thompson is very happy with the service provided: "Downtime would cause major problems for us and we have always been impressed by the speed at which Copy Right sends an engineer out to us when necessary; it seem like we ring one minute and the next minute they are there! We seldom have to wait for as long as the agreed four-hour response time".

VALUE FOR MONEY…
As with any business, controlling costs is a key factor for King Alfred's. Peter Thompson is well aware of the potential for spiralling document hardware and running costs: "We like to keep a tight rein on our costs and look for transparency from our suppliers. From the outset, Copy Right has provided a competitive and transparent pricing and charging structure so we always know how much budget we need to allocate for copying.

We are particularly impressed with the way that Copy Right are happy to present their quotations in a clear and straightforward way that facilitates our testing their prices against other providers".

"Overall, we are very satisfied with our relationship with Copy Right," concludes Peter, "we experience minimum downtime and high quality service. Copy Right and its engineers have become an integral part of the running of the College, always providing us with valuable and accurate advice. We wouldn't hesitate to recommend the company to anyone looking for a reliable, efficient and cost effective copier partner."