Least cost, soonest mended

Programme Board today where we have a close look at all existing projects - looking at progress against timescales, issues, concerns, resources etc. We also look at new project proposals and definitions and project closure documents.

Today we had a couple of new project definitions. The Student Timetables project aims to deliver individual student timetables, via the web, on paper and via hand-held devices.
The timetabling software we use has the capability to deliver individual student timetables, but we've never used it. We've made progress over the years in enabling departmental timetablers to integrate their timetables with the room bookings system and introduce staff and other local data to the system, and this is the next logical step.

The project will enable “student fitting” - allocating students to tutorial/seminar groups so that only the events that students are expected to attend are displayed in their individual timetables. Hopefully this will also improve space utilisation by introducing real-time student numbers to individual events, enabling booking staff to match supply and demand more closely. It will also provide much better and more accurate management information.

The other project is a review of printing across campus - this is a replacement for a project which began its life called Least Cost Printing, affectionately referred to as Least Cost Soonest Mended when we realised it wasn't going anywhere.

The aim of this project is to review and report on current printing procedures at the University in terms of environment, savings and best practice and make recommendations for improvement. The University uses 64,000,000 sheets of paper per year, and our spend for print could be too high and it may be that we are not employing best techniques, service and quality. There are savings attached to not printing and this contributes to energy savings and reducing our carbon footprint. Savings are also achieved by procuring the right/most appropriate output device for printing needs. We also need to consider the whole life cost of a printer and how and where printing occurs. We will be looking at case studies from other Universities that have performed such reviews