When it comes to Australian retailers, BIG W is one of the biggest - that pun (and all the puns to come) is well and truly intended.
A business unit of Woolworths Group, the department store chain consists of 176 locations across Australia. When the COVID-19 pandemic forced an enterprise that big to primarily operate via online pickup and delivery, it made for an even bigger amount of printing. Every package ordered at every store every day needed a label, on top of the standard in-store pricing tickets. That’s an average of between 250,000 to 500,000 print jobs per week!
Today, BIG W handles that workload with PaperCut software and Chrome OS devices. But that wasn’t always the case…
Chromebook printing environment seeks Google Cloud Print alternative
What brought BIG W to this solution pairing? Dial back the clock five years to when the chain made a big infrastructure adjustment to support their store growth.
In 2016, with the support of Woolworths Group IT, the BIG W Team replaced PCs with 3,000 enrolled Chromebooks for all their stores and team members. This move was to support their daily use of web-based apps, and manage label printing.
Naturally, BIG W were using Google Cloud Print with their Chromebook environment, but BIG W Stores Solution Owner, Steven Kernahan, was on the lookout for a simple-to-use Google Cloud Print alternative. Their previous printing solution reaching deprecation/end-of-life (EOL) also presented an opportunity to find print enablement software that would reduce or limit potential points of failure.
Steven needed a simple, quick, and reliable alternative to Google Cloud Print. One that would seamlessly support the Chromebook environment for BIG W’s 20,000+ team members in their 176 stores across the nation: “We were looking for a solution that integrated with our existing solution,” Steven says.
PaperCut Mobility Print seamlessly integrates with Chrome OS infrastructure
Whatever Google Cloud Print alternative BIG W chose for their existing Chrome OS infrastructure, a new solution also needed to scale for all their stores and employees.
A conversation with the technology vendor of their existing print environment presented the answer in our BYOD solution, Mobility Print: “Google actually recommended PaperCut as a printing partner,” Steven recalls. Next came the usual vetting, and with PaperCut Mobility Print ticking all the technological requirements, rollout pushed forward with zero disturbance to standard business procedures.
In January 2021, BIG W started using PaperCut Mobility Print and Chrome OS for their online operations. The migration from Google Cloud Print recorded an immediate 95% reduction in operational incidents.
“Internally, between Google, Woolworths, and PaperCut, we were able to quickly re-architect and develop a solution resulting in greater resilience, stability, and increased efficiency for the team,” Steven says.
500,000 print jobs + 20,000 users + 176 stores = 0 failures
BIG W prints up to 500,000 jobs per week across all their locations. For Steven and his team, the results speak for themselves: “Overall, since migrating printing with PaperCut six months ago, we’ve noted no product or solution failures across 176 stores,“ Steven says. “I would say the biggest impact of Mobility Print has been its simplicity. It’s such a simple solution with a lot of benefits.”
PaperCut Mobility Print has supersized BIG W’s native CTRL+P experience across their entire Chromebook fleet ‒ simplifying workflows, and increasing printing speeds.
In a time where time itself is an incredibly valuable and short commodity, BIG W were able to transform their printing for packaging and labeling pickups and deliveries during the online order boom produced by COVID-19.
Ultimately, time saved and costs reduced while packaging and sending orders means happier customers - and that’s an outcome very dear to PaperCut’s values. Read more about BIG W’s printing success with PaperCut and Chrome OS from Steven Kernahan himself over on the Google Cloud blog.
Then supersize your printing with PaperCut Mobility Print.
DOWNLOAD MOBILITY PRINT
