- Challenge:An outstanding and technically progressive secondary college in Western Australia wanted to track and allocate its print costs. It needed a print management solution that could integrate with its existing mobile card system.
- Solution:Konica Minolta’s solution included PaperCut, i2scan, pull printing and OPS (Optimised Print Services) Advance Monitoring. This has enabled the College to monitor the print use of each department and identify cost savings. It has also begun the process of digitising document management.
- Benefits:Since the installation of Konica Minolta’s integrated business solution Santa Maria College has seen significant results in cost control, cost reduction and a decrease in print waste.
Background
Established in 1938, Santa Maria College is one of the top secondary colleges in Western Australia. It has doubled in size in the last decade and today welcomes 1270 students, including 152 boarders.
Consistently in the top 10 performing schools for the region, the College ensures it keeps completely up to date with technology to support its program of excellence in education. It’s been a 1:1 lap-top school for the past five years and is rated by Apple as ‘distinguished’ in its use of personal technology. Its wireless campus has also been highly rated by Cisco as an exemplar schhol.
The college has a transport card system for all its students. The cards are in constant use because they allow students to travel by bus, use the library and to pay for food and photocopying on campus. However, until last year, students were not able to add their print costs to the multi-purpose card.
The Challenge
In 2014, Santa Maria College Business Manager, Jim Watkins, decided to find a print management solution that would integrate with the cards. He wanted to include printing charges with the other pre-paid card services in order to monitor print costs and adopt best practice He explains:
“As time went by we knew we were certainly not printing less. So, last year, it did become a priority for us to start tracking more accurate printing usage and costs across students and departments.
We really wanted to find a print management solution that would integrate with our existing card system. Konica Minolta were able to clearly demonstrate how they could do it;.”
The college was looking for greater workplace efficiency and cost control; they were particularly looking for a solution that could accurately report the print usage of each department so that department heads could identify further cost savings over time.
Watkins adds: “We were impressed by Konica Minolta’s proven capability to deliver this solution and their case was supported by strong referrals in the education sector.”
Solution
Konica Minolta provided the college with a range of solutions and services to help manage their print environment. Primarily this solution included PaperCut, a pay-for-print cost management solution which could integrate with the college’s existing print swipe card. The solution also comprised optical character recognition software (i2Scan) for better document management, pull printing and remote device monitoring with automated toner ordering (Konica Minolta’s OPS Advance Monitoring)
Jim Watkins comments: “The Follow Me Printing* solution has really improved workplace efficiency, encouraging more responsible print behaviour among our staff and students.
It is complemented by the pay-for-print management software, PaperCut, which we chose to track printing and reduce waste, saving us money. Both are really good products. We have found the accuracy of the data recorded really useful. In fact, most staff and departments were shocked when they started monitoring their real spend in this area.
The combined solution has significantly lowered print volumes and delivered cost savings to the college.”
Mark Henderson, Konica Minolta Business Development Manager, commented:
“The solutions we have supplied to Santa Maria College have been tailored to their needs. PaperCut offers cost control for staff and students and the AirPrint solution we provided allowed all school stakeholders to print via a wireless connection with laptops, tablets etc.”
At the same time as the college adopted the new, improved print management, they felt a hardware upgrade was timely and again they chose our demonstrably reliable devices. They installed a range of monochrome and colour MFDs (24 in total) and one production printer.”
Jim Watkins added: “The multi-function devices (MFDs) now installed are equipped with an API communication system which allows the new software to communicate with all devices at the college.”
OPS Advanced Monitoring was a final part of the package. The solution has ensured the college’s consumables supply is always restocked, helping increase their efficiency and streamlining their business processes. In fact, there has been a 30% reduction in response time for restocking equipment since it was deployed.
Next Steps
The next phase of the complete IT solution may be the adoption of Filebound software which will complement the optical character recognition solution installed last year (i2scan).
i2scan enables batch scanning. It makes large volumes of scanning easy and also routes files for automatic storage. Already, as part of the print management solution installed in 2014, it has enabled the college to seamlessly import large volumes of documents in one go and has sped up the ongoing data storage process.
By gradually moving all documents to digital copy, the college is reducing the potential for lost information and improving the ease of document retrieval.
The Result
Since the installation of Konica Minolta’s integrated business solution Santa Maria College has seen significant results in cost control, cost reduction and a decrease in waste.
“We are very happy with the results we’ve seen so far;” concludes Jim Watkins. “Our costs have instantly been reduced through the implementation of PaperCut. We’ve also seen a reduction in waste due to Konica Minolta’s environmentally efficient devices and can now easily monitor each department’s print usage which helps us to identify where further cost savings could be made.”
Notes
*Follow Me Printing is Konica Minolta’s pull printing solution which gives you the freedom to print your jobs from any networked device.
For more information, visit www.konicaminolta.com.au/education
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