You’d be hard-pressed to find better education advice than from a university that’s been in the game for over 800 years.
Although the University of Cambridge hasn’t necessarily been using PaperCut MF for its print management for all of those eight centuries, they do however know a trick or two.
We caught up for a chat with Kelvin Morgan, computer officer, and Dean Feltham, managed print technician, to get a little wisdom of the ages for our readers.
Kelvin and Dean gave us their tips for how to approach print management, based on their experience with a vast amount of Colleges and end-users to support.
1. Don’t force it
“You can’t force print management onto the users, you can’t force someone to be a user. Rather, you have to encourage.”
2. Start small
“I wouldn’t totally remove the current hardware, but I would put in one or two MFD’s just to start off with and encourage the use of that.”
3. Gradual replacement
“After introducing a small number of MFDs, slowly replace the rest of the hardware with MFDs. Keeping it simple works really well and PaperCut’s features Mobility Print and Find-Me help with keeping it simple.”
4. Redefine KPIs
“I think PaperCut makes print management an easy sell just because no one really likes print. We find a lot of computer officers would actually pass off printing because it’s something they don’t want to concentrate on; they’ve got bigger problems to deal with.
“Therefore having PaperCut and showing the benefits is an easy sell. We can show them that they are able to credit users and do all the bits that they need to do but without having to support the printers day in day out.”
“Not actually pushing it on them, but if you put it as ‘Why wouldn’t you?’ Then it’s more likely they’ll actually buy into it.”
5. Offer simple enhancements
“Show staff and users simple things like replacing single-function printers, showing how the MFD offers a higher quality device and more functions. How it offers things like stapling.”
“Then you can also show them that you can scan with it, scan to OneDrive , scan to Email , things like that - then it starts to make more sense.”
6. Leverage support services
“Explain to your users and staff that print management offers out-of-office support. So, now there are two MFDs, if one breaks, they can simply walk up to another MFD and release their jobs there without reprinting the document. With this approach, you’ll slowly win them over.”
Once you go print management, you don’t want to go back
Kelvin recalls a couple of instances where he didn’t force print management, in fact, he did quite the opposite:
“There was a colleague who we introduced the new MFDs to, and she said that they were awful, just terrible. A couple of months later, she came back to me and apologized and said they’re actually really good.
“On another occasion, an influential college member didn’t take to the recently installed MFD, and the college asked for PaperCut to be removed. So I removed it then two months later, they said, no, we need it back.”
“They had come to realize what it actually offered them, and so I had to reintegrate the MFD again. It was another good example of winning over the workforce with a good service.”
The top 3 benefits of PaperCut according to Cambridge
Speaking of printing tips, we asked Kelvin to distill the top 3 benefits of PaperCut in Cambridge University’s printing environment.
- Enabling the undergraduates to pay for their printing.
- Ability to get rid of single-function printers, and get a communal cost-effective printer that you can put under a maintenance and toner agreement. Removing the single-function printers to an MFD gives you so much more functionality. All the hassle is given to the centralized managers.
- Can drill down quite easily into the data e.g. if a user has a problem and is trying to get a refund credit it’s quite easy just to drill down and find out what their usage is. It’s just the ease of use really.
Want to know more?
If you’d like to read more about Cambridge University’s implementation of PaperCut, check out this blog over here .
