Nelly Pütz College in Düren chooses WorkForce Pro RIPS

The Nelly Pütz College in Düren offers a broad spectrum of courses. Teachers aim to prepare its 1,300 students for the diverse demands of their future careers while at the same time preserving their joy in learning and living, in line with the school's motto: "Opportunity – Living – Learning".

The school places great value on guiding children and young people towards dealing sustainably with resources. This includes instilling in them a sense of the importance of a sustainable and sparing approach to energy. In mid-August 2015, the college phased out its laser printers and chose energy-saving inkjet technology for its new print solutions.

"Equipping our school with energy-saving inkjet printers and multifunction devices fits perfectly with our goal of managing resources such as electricity as sustainably as possible," explains Britta Ellinghaus, Head Teacher of the Nelly Pütz College. "In addition, inkjets not only help us to reduce energy consumption but also support us in our 'zero-emissions school' project."

The school is running two WorkForce Pro RIPS R8590DTWFs and three WorkForce Pro RIPS R5690DWFs. While the A4 WorkForce Pro R5690DWFs have made their home in the school office, the A3+ R8590DTWFs mainly work as copying stations for large-format documents. The college now prints its own headed notepaper, and no longer uses pre-printed material, saving the cost and time of placing external print orders.

The teaching staff mainly print lesson plans, worksheets and test papers. The machines have to be able to deal with large print runs, because the number of sheets per student per day quickly adds up. In contrast to the previous print solutions, which mostly only worked in black and white, the new inkjets all print in colour.

"The switch from black and white printing to colour has changed the college's printing behaviour", continues Ellinghaus. "Colour offers more possibilities than black and white for teaching materials and the teachers enjoy exploiting this to the students' benefit. As a result, the number of copies has risen because of the possibilities offered by the new printers."

Despite these larger print volumes, costs haven't spiralled out of control. Frank Pongratz, Managing Director of Keller-Büromaschinen, explains, "The school prints a lot, so it was just a matter of simple arithmetic to further increase potential ink savings by using Epson RIPS printers. While these devices are a little more expensive to purchase, this is offset very quickly by the cheap operating costs."

Britta Ellinghaus gives her view of the college's new printing infrastructure: "The next step is to swap the few remaining desktop lasers for inkjets. The staff of the college are glad that we now have efficient and economical printing technology."