Chris James, manager of digital media services at the council, said that the investment was intended to not only reduce printing costs, but to transform document management into a revenue-generating activity by enabling the council to actively compete for commercial print work.

"When we ran the numbers we found we were outsourcing approximately £500,000 of work each year across the various departments within the borough," said James, who added that this rose to between £1m to £1.5m when including postal and associated publishing costs.

"The target was spending £100,000 per year for next five years and we calculated savings that would drop out of that from bringing things in-house, from things like office printer fleet rationalisation and the outsourced print spend.

"We’ve taken out 250 office printers and on average they’re £1,000-2,000 per annum to maintain and look after; we’ve literally gone from around 400 devices to less than 200 and we’ve done that in a year. But the bigger saving and bigger investment is within the centralised print unit and bringing in the lion’s share of that £1m-plus that was just going out the door."

In addition to the iGen3 press, the council has invested in the Xerox FreeFlow workflow suite, which is connected to a digital storefront on the RBWM intranet and through which council departments and employees can order a variety of templated products.

The inplant has also installed a Xerox 8254E wide-format printer, a Duplo System 3500 digital finishing system, a DC445 slitter/cutter/creaser and DB280 perfect binder.

The first part of James' plan to turn print into a revenue-generating operation is to reduce the amount produced by the council, both by the in-plant and across its fleet of office printers, by driving users and council residents towards online communications.

"I took ownership of everything from the office through to online communications and implemented applications, processes, and new workflows right the way through," explained James.

"We’re driving from the highest cost option to the lowest cost option. We’ve now got complete control over our assets: we know what we’ve got, we know what it’s costing, and we can accurately report that to the business.

"In centralised print, which is our brave new world, we’ve got our web-to-print solution, which is accessed via our intranet, and we’re offering a range of interactive services, like YouTube commercials, that take you beyond print.

"Print’s a core aspect of what we do and it’s going to be around for a very long time, but what we’re trying to do is offer our customers solutions through multi-channels and a different marketing mix."

The second part of James' five-year strategy, which is budgeted to cost £500,000, is to fill the iGen press with external public and private sector commercial work, replacing the lost volume of the council's own communications as they move to online.

"It could be that after five years we’ve achieved a push to online and we’ve actually made this unit redundant to some extent," said James. "That actually would be quite a major success, but if we could fill that void with commercial work, real money coming in, it makes this unit self-financing, so there’s an element of risk but also significant rewards and if we get it right then it’s more than achievable."

James, a former APCOM board member, admitted that the issue of public sector in-plants competing for private sector work was a "difficult and a thorny issue" but added that his goal was to achieve best-value for the council's residents.

"The legislation is out there where we’re allowed to compete commercially in the marketplace – our focus is around other local authorities and public sector but I think there is a realism that actually the potential for gaining revenues from private sector is very much a potential as well," said James.

"We make it a point to use local and always have done when we outsource stuff. It’s about best-value for the resident – and if that best value is to produce it internally rather than outsource then that’s the route it should go."

He added: "Where many in-plants have struggled – like many printers – is to adapt to new technology and they’re really struggling to find a justification for their existence. We’re talking about trying to have more effective communications to our residents, manage our costs more effectively and deliver more targeted information and adapt to the future.

"We’ve evolved from being just a purist public sector in-plant print and unfortunately there are lots of those that are under increasing pressure and are simply disappearing from the face of the planet."