The first day of school will be here before you know it. While students enjoy their final weeks of summer, school administrators, IT managers, and print center leaders know it’s time to get organized. Whether you’re supporting a K-12 district or a college campus, proactive planning now can help eliminate printing headaches coming in August.

At SumnerOne, we work closely with schools across the Midwest to ensure their document management infrastructure runs smoothly year-round. Here’s our quick and actionable School Summer Checklist to prepare your print and document environment for a successful new year. 

Now it’s the perfect time for in-plant print managers in higher education to assess how their operations are performing. From admissions brochures to course packets, athletics programs to alum outreach materials, your shop plays a mission-critical role across departments. But how do you measure success? 

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) provide a data-driven approach to understanding your in-plant’s effectiveness, identifying areas for improvement, and showcasing your value to stakeholders. Whether you’re reporting to procurement, administration, or IT, these metrics can help secure future funding, justify equipment upgrades, and align your shop’s services with campus needs. 

Here are five essential KPIs every higher ed in-plant should be tracking—and why they matter. 

As July rolls around, educators and administrators across K-12 and higher education are deep into preparation mode for the upcoming academic year. From student registration packets to course syllabi, school directories to promotional materials, summer is a critical window for aligning print infrastructure and processes. 

But too often, poor print planning can lead to costly bottlenecks, missed deadlines, and operational inefficiencies that impact the first weeks of school. Whether you're managing an in-plant print shop or coordinating with an outside vendor, here are six common back-to-school print mistakes to avoid — and how to get ahead of them. 

For every organization, managing office costs is always essential, and sometimes the biggest culprits are hiding in plain sight.

Copiers can become quite costly without an efficient management strategy. Users may not notice, but simple print jobs can inflate maintenance costs by demanding more toner cartridge replacements at a time.

In this article, we share easy tips to keep your copier costs in check. 

When students leave campus and administrative demands slow down, higher ed in-plant print shops have a golden opportunity: summer. This often-overlooked off-season is the ideal time to step back, reassess operations, and make improvements that will pay dividends throughout the academic year.

Whether you're looking to optimize workflows, upskill your team, expand into new services, or modernize your fleet, summer provides the time and space to make strategic moves. Here are four key areas where your in-plant can gain an edge before fall rush begins. 

The summer season has arrived, and with it comes many trade shows you might be interested in attending. After all, this moment is important for commercial print shops in discovering potential partners and clients.

Whether showcasing your latest product innovations, observing the ongoing trends in the industry, or simply understanding competitors and how you can adjust your company in response, trade shows remain an essential part of summer.

But here is the problem: how will your booth attract potential customers even with product innovations? With all the competitors around, how can you direct the people you want to impress toward your booth? Enter: print materials.

As technology continues transforming the business landscape, artificial intelligence (AI) is making bold moves in unexpected places—including printing. From predictive maintenance to hyper-personalization, AI-powered print solutions are reshaping how we think about efficiency, quality, and customer engagement.