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High school|

School district subtracts two thirds of its printers by adding PaperCut MF

Student with laptop

Cutting to the chase

Problem

Too many printers. Google Cloud Print going away.

Solution

Set up reporting. Add Mobility Print with badge authentication.

Outcome

Reduced the number of printers by two thirds and reduced costs.

The Lubbock Independent School District (ISD) was established in 1907. It’s the largest school district — 61 campuses — serving the city of Lubbock, Texas.

The district includes elementary, early childhood, middle, high, and special purpose schools, and alternative campuses.

Yes, the 27,000 students and 3500 staff do a lot of printing! And that printing was done on thousands of printers.

Eventually it came to a point where the print environment became too big and convoluted to manage. Something had to be done to manage the printers (and everything about them), and to find a replacement for the soon-to-be deprecated Google Cloud Print they were using.

Download this customer story as a PDF
The number of printers has dramatically reduced. We went from several thousand printers to I think right now our fleet is 700, so two-thirds of our printers have been removed"

- Robert Causer,

Technology Services, Lubbock ISD

Problem

Too many printers. Google Cloud Print going away.

According to Robert Causer from Technology Services at Lubbock ISD, “I couldn’t even tell you how many thousands of printers we had. In just about every nook and cranny there was a printer – it was like the Wild Wild West of printers! Things were somewhat out of control”.

The district printer fleet reached several thousand printers randomly distributed across the campuses, with varying degrees of use. Eventually, with so many printers being used by so many people, service calls were taking up around 30% of Tech Services time, and toner and paper costs were skyrocketing.

Solution

Set up reporting. Add Mobility Print with badge authentication.

The team implemented the idea of ‘printer pods’ in convenient locations—out went the printers on desks, hidden in corners, and squirreled in offices.

They also set up Print Deploy to push out the printer drivers, and made sure everyone had Mobility Print so they could print from their devices. “Mobility Print is on everything. Chromebooks, iPads, Windows devices…” Robert says.

Robert and his colleagues also replaced Google Cloud Print with Mobility Print so teachers can still print when they’re not in their building. “It’s really easy and user friendly to set up”, he said. “I can just send someone to that URL for deployment and then they’re good to go”.

The final part of the solution was to set up reporting and start sending reports to the campuses each month to let them know how much printing they’d done.

“We can identify the top people that have been printing at the campus level," Robert says, “And say to the principal you might want to go have a conversation with them”.

Over time the principals have come to understand they can use the reports to directly impact their budget, and they’ve started having those conversations with their staff.

Outcome

Reduced the number of printers by two thirds and reduced costs.

“The number of printers has dramatically reduced. We went from several thousand printers to I think right now our fleet is 700, so two-thirds of our printers have been removed!” said Robert.

As pods were created and printers were removed, the initial reaction was resistance — you’re taking away my printer! That was until the benefits started to become apparent. It took a couple of months for the staff and students to get used to the new way of printing and realize its versatility.

“With the way we have PaperCut set up, you can go anywhere in the district and print your print job. And with Mobility Print, teachers can print something - like tests - at home and then come in the next morning and just get their job before they go into the classroom, to save time” explained Robert. “It lends itself to a lot more freedom.”

The volume of printing has steadily declined over the last three years, leading to reduced energy costs (fewer devices plugged in), and significant savings from the reduction in toner and paper supplies.

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