How to go about writing a report on getting Print Management Software

[has]

Afternoon,
You guys and gals might have read my previous post regarding "what to do when its quite". A few of you recommended getting some kind of print management software for the school, as were currently printing alot and some of it really doesnt get picked from the printers etc. Anyways, We have small mono printers in each class for teachers use (about 50). We also have about 12 network laser printers for ICT suites and faculty bases. And couple of MFD's. I had installed papercut print logger last year to track the printing. I know its not completely accurate (i.e staff can cancel the print job but still registers it in the log) and its only logging the network printers and not local ones.

I was wondering if any of you have done a proposal of this sort for the heads.

Any info or tips would be appreciated.

Cheers,

Has

[soveryapt]

I basically worked out the savings that could be implemented by using PaperCut (we have the MF version here) in terms of cost centre allocation for a start (so more accurate representation of the printing that was being done by departments etc) and showed a couple of the "this is the kind of report you can get from it" examples - there is a free trial, or certainly used to be, that you can even run for a week or so to get some real life examples.

Management always want to know what the benefit will be of the software, so better restrictions on printing and all that jazz is normally a good one, but then they don't like to be too restrictive I've found. We ran a year where it used the desktop client to show staff how much printing allocation they had left for a particular month and it worked quite well in that it cut down the amount of printing and staff didn't seem to waste quite as much, but then they wanted to remove that again and just silently track the printing that was going on.

If you are going to go down the route of PaperCut, what is you plan for it? Is it just print tracking and allocation, or do you want to use it for something more? With the MF version, you can buy licenses for more modern MFP units that means Papercut will then interface with them to allow user control across the site and devices and you could then set up a print release system, so that staff send stuff to print and it will only actually print out upon being released by that staff member. This can interface with card readers if it would be easier to give staff a card to log on to do that, but I've not gone down that route just yet, so I can't say how well card readers work with it all - I do have print release for our Art Room PhotoPrinter though which is available for a limited number of staff, so I do know the print release works rather well.

Anyway, I've probably rambled a bit there, but hopefully something I've said might be of use to you putting it together. End of the day, you know your management team better than the rest of us, so write it how best you think they will understand it (both from the workings and the cost implications) and that will get them on your side to look further at it, it not approve it straight off.

Andy T

[nicholab]

Printing is not exciting yet school spend vast sums on it!!

[Ric_]

You will also want to show that you have far too many small printers. I suspect a lot of printing (in largish volumes) will be done on those rather than your much cheaper MFDs.

Graphs showing the disproportionate amount of printing from some departments can also be useful and can be used as a reason to bill back printing to departments - why should departments that are economical with prints subsidise those that are not?

Another handy report is to show which of these vitally important printers are used very rarely - where I used to work there was a user who insisted on having a large printer in their department's office (and they were very vocal about how it 'never' worked) but it turned out that it had been used to print aprox. 30 pages in 3 months!

Whatever you do... 64 printing devices is insane!

[has]

Cheers for replying back. I was thinking of using paper cut especially to track individual printing, department billing etc. print release station is a good idea but might wait a while after the heads approve the go ahed with paper cut. I want to get rid of the local mono laser printers and have only 1 mfd per department. We currently have Ricoh mpc3500 and mpc1500, can these have papercut programmed?

[deano]

We went through the same process over a year ago. There were 117 printers in total around school and a central budget for all Toners and drums, that nobody was accountable for. I knew the cost for running would.be extortionate, but never thought it.would.be.so.bad.

First we found a cost for per page on all types of printers and mfds. Next we went round during a half term and noted the page counter for every device. We left it to the next break and went round again for page counters. This will give.you.an easy sum of how.much you are.spending. obviously each month is different in schools, with a couple of months when hardly anybody is there.

To end, we were spending close to £70k a year. We have now implemented follow you with 11mfds. Current spend

[nicholab]

I bet you did not get that £70k that you saved spent on ICT!!

[soveryapt]

Cheers for replying back. I was thinking of using paper cut especially to track individual printing, department billing etc. print release station is a good idea but might wait a while after the heads approve the go ahed with paper cut. I want to get rid of the local mono laser printers and have only 1 mfd per department. We currently have Ricoh mpc3500 and mpc1500, can these have papercut programmed?

I have a Ricoh MP4000 which can be programmed, so I would presume the others can, but I can't guarantee. I use ITS - Info Technology Supply Ltd, Onelog, ITS:IrisCD, MyPC, R& R, Resource booking, Mirtrak, PaperCut NG, PaperCut MF LanSchool, Faronics Deep Freeze, Faronics Power Save, Faronics Anti Virus, Pharos Uniprint - Essential IT solutions for Education, P for my PaperCut supply and they could let you know which machines can and cannot be programmed and managed by PaperCut.

They were the UK reseller I was advised of when I contacted PaperCut directly.

[Big_Ted]

Cheers for replying back. I was thinking of using paper cut especially to track individual printing, department billing etc. print release station is a good idea but might wait a while after the heads approve the go ahed with paper cut. I want to get rid of the local mono laser printers and have only 1 mfd per department. We currently have Ricoh mpc3500 and mpc1500, can these have papercut programmed?

Hi,

The Ricoh embedded platform is based on Java.

The MPC3500 is a version 2 Java machine (meaning it is old but will work with papercut embedded)
the MPC1500 by the looks of it does not have any Java capabilities.

You can of course still monitor prints on the 1500 or if need be use external hardware such as the cPad to monitor the copy jobs and act as a release station:
Tour - CPad Control Terminal (Hardware) - PaperCut MF

[Big_Ted]

They were the UK reseller I was advised of when I contacted PaperCut directly.

ITS are an ASC as per: Authorized Solutions Centers - PaperCut

Typically the first port of call for anyone looking to purchase PaperCut MF would be with their incumbent copier provider to see if they sell the product.

[User3204]

One of the reasons I put in Papercut was so I could work out where all my printing was happening, and why my toner costs had gone from about £7k pa to £12k pa in one year.

Dunno about the previous years, but last year I spend £4500 on black and £7500 on colour, plus the copier contract was another £12k too.


Our bursar wants to make it so all printing is done centrally.. although I bet she'll complain if I take away her colour printer...

[Frut02]

We went through this last year and after a huge report they decided to say no. I just worked out the costs of printing at the moment by dividing the toner cost by the yield and of course the savings that the school would get, we worked out that we would save nearly 8000 pages a year, also removing all of the old local inkjets with small B/W lasers so that they could be monitored and in the long run they come out cheaper. Just named the pros and cons and what we wanted to achieve by putting a print system in place, i think they were Environmental impact, reducing cost and student awareness (with paper cut credits and responsibility with the money they were given)

I'm going to try again this year with a different company, still want to use papercut though. The Tech/IT department have got through 40 boxes of paper this year with another 15 on order.

[Ric_]

In my previous role, I plumped for Konica Minolta MFDs and a few colour lasers (all direct from Konica Minolta). All these were covered under the same managed printing contract along with PCounter. The MFDs used PCounter Embedded for follow-me printing. It worked really well and saved a fortune. Plus the service was amazing - default of 4 hour response!!! - so I rarely touched a printer again

In order to get some user buy-in (people hate you taking things off them), I ended up pushing the advanced features of the new devices as the selling point - more A3 printing capacity, network scanning from all the MFDs, ability to privately print documents so that they weren't picked up by someone else, etc.

[brownbread]

I have actually installed and managed papercut and its pretty easy to use.

I would recommend integrating it with your photocopiers, and bin those printers!!