Business College, Denmark

Today’s youth are major IT consumers and their choice of educational institution is greatly influenced by the IT services placed at their disposal, i.e. laptops, wireless internet and printing options.

Challenge

The students’ printing demands present something of a dilemma. The college stance is that students should have optimal copying and printing facilities, but at the same it wants the students to exhibit a certain amount of restraint with regard to consumption. For this reason the college recently decided to implement SafeCom’s Smart Printing solution.

To date, the school has not introduced any restrictions in the form of quotas or a user fee. The students have to learn to manage their own consumption and this is where SafeCom comes into its own. When surfing on the Internet, the solution allows students to think twice about whether they really need to order printouts from all the websites they feel they might need in the future.

Solution

The decision to implement SafeCom’s Smart Printing solution was taken when the Business College recently had to upgrade its copy and printing equipment. The IT department chose Xerox as total supplier, and together they reached the conclusion that SafeCom offered the best print management solution. One of the things that appealed to the school most about SafeCom was its central monitoring function. As yet, they haven’t had time to implement it, but this is their next step and they will use monitoring to make sure that printing costs don’t spiral out of control. They will monitor at equipment and user level, and if they find that a student has an exceptionally high consumption, they will call the person in for a "heart-to-heart" talk. Students have a tendency to click on "print" when they surf. Later, when they go through their printouts, they discover that a lot of what they printed is not worth keeping. SafeCom’s pull print function gives them an extra reminder only to print what they need and not to throw paper into the waste paper basket.

Benefits

By combining the Xerox WorkCentre 5675 with the solutions that were implemented, the Business College will be able to increase efficiency and savings. The primary goal was to obtain a stable solution, using student ID-cards that would be intuitive to use.

The school’s IT-Team suspected that the wastage percentage was too high because they could see piles of discarded printouts lying in the waste paper baskets. However, it was not possible to measure the exact amount of wastage. SafeCom has changed all that.

Previously the IT department had problems with students copying textbooks on the school’s photocopiers. This is still going on to some extent, but will stop when the SafeCom monitoring function is implemented.

In addition to the obvious administrative advantages, there were many good reasons for choosing SafeCom. According to the IT-Manager the SafeCom system is so easy to use. It is user-friendly, easy to maintain and the actual implementation process was extremely smooth. The solution is able to handle the many young users and has regulated their behavior so that they all became more aware of their actions associated with printing, copying and scanning.