Cost Cutting Exercise

[tj2419]

Hi

 

I am trying to find ways we can cut costs due to budget constraints. I have a couple of areas in mind and wondered if any of you have done similar and could share advice over whether it made a big difference and whether it's worth it.

 

Asset management: Do you use a paid system or free / speadsheet system for whole school asset management, not just IT assets.

Printing: Do you use a managed print solution? Did it save you money? Do you just have standalone printers replace when broken? How much roughly do you spend per year on a managed print solution?

VLE: Do you use a paid system? Use something free like google classroom / microsoft classroom?

 

I have been trying to keep up with the changes coming to EES licensing. We are fixed for three years but i am worried about what will happen to the costs after that. I can see they are removing the discounts so costs will increase but by how much?

 

Or if you have any other ways you have been able to save money and want to share?

 

Thanks

[robyholmes]

Asset Management: SharePoint list with barcode labels

Printing: Papercut MF (Reduced our printing by over 50%) Removed most desktop printers so staff & pupils use MFDs. Remaining printers are double the cost to use.

VLE: Moving from rarely used Moodle to Office365 (Trailing Classroom)

Edited September 20, 2016 by robyholmes

[Meldrew]

Asset management: a spreadsheet

Printing: papercut and 7 copiers, down from circa 70 desktop printers. Saved about £15k a year.

VLE: Using moodle, but don't think its used much. Also looking into Office365 and possibly classroom too.

 

What else does your budget cover that you could look at? Broadband costs? PC renewal?

 

Meldrew

[tj2419]

Broadband was moved last year to schoolsbroadband from the LEA to save about £2k a year.

 

PC renewal has already slipped to 5 year cycles and is showing real signs of wear and tear so looking at what else we can do.

 

Thanks for the feedback so far really useful.

[Lonix]

Asset management:

We have the School Asset Management system – not highly priced but I prefer this over a spreadsheet. Has a useful little App too.

 

Printing:

I would say yes and although we can’t limit everything we want through PaperCut (apparently it’s coming). Considering how much we have printed reaching millions in a short time, comparing those costs to dead printers/toner replacements… Then again our print system is so easy/quick to use its perhaps too quick and easy for people to just “Print”. You can save a lot of money by doing it this way (you must fight best prices though) and the biggest challenge is getting staff to realise they can’t take the mick. We’ve had to hammer down hard on this but I’ve got the backing of those at the top – otherwise it falls on deaf ears. We are spending a lot still….. and I mean a lot…

 

VLE:

Moodle - Free

 

Get suppliers to fight – although you should be going to tender, I know some people purposely choose high priced suppliers so they don’t have to change.

 

Non Branded PCs – We get non branded and they have worked/lasted as well as branded machines. The savings are not simply 10% either, I’d say around 35/40% with SSDs too.

 

SSDs – Instead of new PCs, depending on what spec PCs you have.

 

Specs – Get what you need, not what you fancy. We’ve been sticking to Intel i3s and as mentioned with SSDs they feel like powerful equipment. Only our film studies course has i5s.

 

PCs in classrooms instead of Laptops – This is what we do, cuts down annual costs of laptops and it’s very rare for us to replace a PC due to damage.

 

IWBs – We still question these and recent results could indicate that they don’t necessarily make a gain. These have been put on a lower priority to keep working.

 

Bulbless projectors – Don’t need to say too much about these.

 

Evaluate all software > annual licenses you pay – I did this, found quite a few pieces not being used by more than a few members of Staff. I didn’t pull the plug but left those above to decide if it’s worth paying £5000 a year when one person likes it.

 

Broadband - moving away from LEA for 200MB, same stuff etc and saving around 20% when compared to 100MB costs.

 

New Phone system and calls etc - saved around 10% for something far better too.

 

Course all the above is only my own experience but I can’t complain and seems to be working on us cost cutting. Hope it helps!!!

Edited September 20, 2016 by Lonix

[tj2419]

Who do people use for their managed print solutions? Thanks

[newpersn]

Who do people use for their managed print solutions? Thanks

 

we use Koncia Minolta,

 

Same as above...

 

Moodle - In house now instead of paying for support... (no one uses it, just the home page)

Printing - Papercut - Kids £5 a month. Printer set at 5p or 10p a copy.

Assets - We use Every.education (site team use the issues sides for site problems)

Suppliers - i tend to swap between people.. I even use ebuyer as they can be cheaper for bits than suppliers)

Broadband - Moving away from SWGFL and increasing speed. (30mb to 100mb) and saving around 1-2k a year

Only replacing computers that need to be replaced.

[truebluesteve]

Asset Management - WASP. We paid for it years ago and have had free upgrades all the way through annd no support costs

Printing - Managed Service with Sharp

VLE - Moodle (was with Webanywhere but have detached ourselves from them) Its not used very much at all and is likely to be binned completely soon

 

We've used SSD's to extend the life of many of our PC's and will continue to do so as others get older.

[Joanne]

Just to add the the print solutions, we use DMS and have copiers with Papercut where people have to release their prints by scanning a card at the copier - we have saved LOADS on paper and unnecessary printing. I think this could be your biggest saving by far.

[Matt_Renato]

Just to add the the print solutions, we use DMS and have copiers with Papercut where people have to release their prints by scanning a card at the copier - we have saved LOADS on paper and unnecessary printing. I think this could be your biggest saving by far.

 

I'll second that. A few years ago the school I was working at replaced all the desktop printers with MFD's in key locations. It makes you think twice about printing something if you have to walk down the corridor to fetch it.

[Joanne]

I'll second that. A few years ago the school I was working at replaced all the desktop printers with MFD's in key locations. It makes you think twice about printing something if you have to walk down the corridor to fetch it.

 

for us people were sending things to print and then forgetting about it (we used to have 2 copiers, but without papercut), so the release feature has really improved waste levels!

[broomop]

you don't even need to use papercut if you have print hold facility on your printer. This will do the same for you for free.

[MatthewL]

Printing try to get rid of local USB printers, get as many on the network as possible, put all queues on a printer server and share out, default to mono and double sided where you can. Deploy PaperCut MF and set some restrictions i.e. no more than 10 pages to printers, if you haven't start to look at MFD, hold all jobs till released and delete after x days, this will reduce. Put the onus on departments, allocate their costs for printing to a shared account and let it come off and they will soon start saving when they use all their print & copy budget in 10 days. As local printers/small printers fail don't replace, push for MFD solution. Locating devices in the right place is key. If you still have a heavy fleet of desktop based printers you can retain jobs on these using PaperCut and get staff to release jobs from the web page or delete or even us a Raspberry Pi as a release terminal and allow users to do it them selves.

 

Printing can be a massive hit, some printers do have their own hold functions but can be bypassed when a user knows how to with PaperCut its forced and you can track the printing. This alone will start to save money and make users more accountable.

 

SSD's in machines can change the machine into something new, worth a few quid.

 

As mentioned above, play your suppliers off and get the cheapest price, loyalty is nothing these days.

 

Phone systems, look to get something SIP based, calls will generally cost you nothing if you go with something like this. This ties into your broadband connection obviously this needs to be good for that to work successfully. ISDN is been phased out I am lead to believe over the next few years so you will need to look at it and generally ISDN wasn't cheap.

 

Power saving software to shutdown computers and other hardware saves a few pence but adds up.

 

See who other people on here are using as suppliers, there maybe one lurking around that no one has heard off but does the best deal and saves you a packet.

[Davit2005]

We use Canon UniFlow followme printing, saved a bundle, approx 70K per year in our case. Staff cannot argue about confidentiality of printing to an MFD because it only prints the docs when they present their card to the printer. All office printers have being removed leaving only printers in IT classroom sbut the MFD's are set to default in 99% of area's.

 

As for PC's, we buy branded both myself and the head of IT have had big issues with non-branded PC's. We have approx 1400 Windows Desktops and get about 3-4 failures a year, no driver issues and a painless rollout of replacement desktops via MDT.

 

We use Moodle at the moment, this being hosted externally but the skills are in house now so planing to move that back.

 

For asset we use a hosted Parago system this allows barcodes to be read by phone apps and directly put on the system.

[FN-GM]

I have done quite a bit of cost cutting over the last 18 months or so.

 

1. Dumped frog for Google classroom.

2. Replaced Vmware for Hyper-V

3. Replaced Cisco phone system for FreePBX also moving from ISDN to SIP

4. Moved internet connection (plus its much better!).

5. Moved to Office 365 for emails, need less storage on site now

6. Replacing laptops for Chromebooks.

7. Changed digital signage to Xibo

8. Automatic shutdown of machines

9. Removed IRIS in favour of SIMS behaviour

10. Removed e2 Reports for SIMS reports

 

We was already on a managed print solution. However I have am making changes to this and saving about 10K on that.

Edited October 5, 2016 by FN-GM