This morning I went to a celebratory event for the end of our My Sustainable Print Project. All of our print champions were invited (the people in departments who really worked with us to make this happen), as well as some of the CiCS team and Sharp, our suppliers.
It was an opportunity to thank everyone for what has been a technical and operational challenge, as well as a huge culture change across the University. Our network of print champions, the suppliers and the different teams within CiCS have collaborated and cooperated to get to where we are today.
We started a few years ago with a complete print audit of the University by our consultants, Wyse, and from that we realised how many benefits a completely managed print solution would bring.
Sharp were awarded the contract in Dec 2013, and began planning immediately, and the roll-out programme began on 6 January 2014. Between 6 january and 31 March 521 devices were rolled out across the whole campus.
As well as rolling out the new machines we also introduced a new Pharos control solution across the fleet, a new scanning function and follow you printing for all staff so that everyone can print to any machine across campus. In addition, all old photocopying equipment was removed, some devices were redeployed to student library locations and a procedure for logging support calls was established. Finally, all old printers were removed. This was not without difficulties ;-)
The old printers were sent to a community enterprise in Sheffield, Aspire, which provides support to vunerable and socially excluded people. They have arranged for the printers to be reused or recycled, thus providing significant social benefit to the local community. So far we've removed about 1800 printers, with more to go.
There were challenges which had to be met during the deployment, including the logistics of ordering, storing and delivering so many printers to different locations, the aggressive timescales, the extent of remedial works needed (for example provision of additional power and data points), changing departmental requirements, health and safety issues around location of devices, and some product specific issues including an early problem with the scanning software.
However, the deployment has been hugely successful, and we are now transiting from deployment to management and support, with a fleet manager and two engineers permanently based on site.
One of our next developments will be the roll out of Everyone Print which will facilitate printing from mobile devices and manage guest print at the beginning of September
Some of the many benefits are:
1 Cost savings of c£1m per annum. Getting rid of expensive to run printers, replaced with more cost effective and more functional devices
2 Positive contribution to green credentialsReduction of power consumption of the print fleet by 80%
CO2 emissions reduced from 24 to 5 tonnes per annum
Reduced size of printer estate.
3 A fully managed service with a reduction of internal IT time spent working on printers. which can be redirected to other projects.
4 Improvements to service delivery with a team based on site working to a tight SLA with specific targets
Going forward, we now have a sustainable print coordinator based in CiCS who will manage the contract and the service, and act as coordinator with technical teams and support teams in CiCS as well as all suppliers.
We are looking at establishing a Service Advisory Group to input into development of the service
The Helpdesk are providing first line support, logging calls on our servicedesk software which handles the escalation to second line support provided by Sharp.
A benefits realisation group had been established which will analyse and report on savings and benefits. and produce case studies to demonstrate best practice .
Finally, our highly successful Print Champions network will be maintained to help us in collecting feedback and optimising the service.
Its really nice to see the completion of such a successful project, and I'd personally like to add my thanks to everyone involved - the Project Team, the technical teams in CiCS, the Helpdesk, the print Champions and the suppliers - Sharp, Wyse and Aspire. Well done everyone! But we mustn't forget our comms team who worked hard to get the message out to the University about what was happening:
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