Simple cloud-based print management needn’t be a dream. For DNEAT (Diocese of Norwich Education and Academies Trust) – a school trust for primary education in Norfolk and the Waveney Valley in Suffolk – it’s now a reality, along with reduced print volumes and costs
DNEAT is a multi-site organisation of 35 schools with over 10,000 students and staff, but no dedicated IT team. Until recently, DNEAT’s printing presented cost and waste problems. With the large printing volume of an entire multi-academy trust, DNEAT was spending too much on print consumables and overfilling its paper waste baskets. Additionally, the entire MAT lacked resources for onsite infrastructure.
Reduced waste and print costs
Saul Garthwaite, Year 3 teacher and computing lead at Peterhouse Primary Academy, was tasked with finding a built-for-cloud print management solution. The trust turned to PaperCut Hive to reduce DNEAT’s paper wastage, shrink its printing costs, and enable secure and convenient printing.
DNEAT’s printing problems began with the automatic release of jobs. This snowballed into a variety of issues but was primarily a waste of money, paper, and toner. “Being a large school district, there is a huge amount of printing. Paper, aside from staffing, is one of our biggest costs,” said Saul. “One of the main causes of wastage for teachers is sometimes forgetting that you’ve already sent a print job and you send it again.”
Negating the need for local print servers with cloud-only print
In addition to wasteful printing, without a dedicated IT team DNEAT required a cloud-only print management solution to remove the need to maintain local print servers. PaperCut Hive met DNEAT’s requirements for a cloud-only print solution. Specialised server infrastructure was not required onsite to run the software. Instead, schools leveraged their existing onsite computers and laptops to fulfil this role.
The embedded MFD software provided both ease of use and sustainability by enabling users to select which print jobs they wanted to release and to delete any duplicated print jobs. This ensured that print jobs were only released once their owner was at the printer. Additionally, the cloud printing functionality enabled remote off-site printing to optimise hybrid working and blended teaching.
Scaling to meet the print needs of schools of all sizes
PaperCut Hive’s fully-hosted SaaS platform means schools of any size in the DNEAT trust can manage their printing environment, regardless of their printer brands – all with just an internet connection.
PaperCut Hive provided DNEAT with a simple and powerful solution to cut down waste and save costs: “There’s been a massive decrease in wastage,” commented Saul. “Keeping paper costs down means that money can be better placed elsewhere, such as extra staffing or resources for the children.”
Simplifying hybrid print
On top of reducing expenses and paper misuse, PaperCut Hive was the perfect solution to support DNEAT’s shift to hybrid working. The solution’s cloud printing functionality enables teachers and staff to roam between school sites and the flexible remote workflows increase efficiency for blended learning and hybrid working.
With PaperCut Hive, staff and students at all DNEAT schools can print from any device, from any location: “The fact that the system is remote allows for a nice bit of adaptability for us,” says Saul. “If we’re at home on a Sunday night, we can press print in the PaperCut Hive mobile app. We can then release the document first thing in the morning.”
Keeping print simple and secure
As DNEAT discovered, PaperCut Hive brings the best-of-breed Internet of Things mindset and technology into the world of print, with one objective: to keep printing simple and secure. One of the strengths of the Edge Mesh within PaperCut Hive is that there is no need to have infrastructure if it isn’t wanted. At the same time, it removes single points of failure that affect other print management in the cloud solutions that use appliances to connect to the cloud.
High performance printing at all times
Another cloud print management problem PaperCut Hive has solved for users like DNEAT is the speed of printing. While some software vendors have slowed down the printing process by sending documents up to the cloud and back down again—frustrating teachers and admin staff who have to waste time waiting for their document to print—PaperCut Hive keeps printed documents within the workplace, via the Edge Mesh.
Save money, save time, save trees
PaperCut Hive also helps give back to the Earth and the printing budget. It offers eco-friendly policies to reduce the school’s environmental impact, so they can easily reduce paper waste, save on toner/ink, recover costs, and make sustainable habits the status quo. Schools can also turn their printing into tree planting with our Forest Positive printing program, PaperCut Grows.
Secure print for all
Of course, keeping data secure is job number one for schools. For peace-of-mind printing, PaperCut Hive has security features built-in to keep documents private and on-site, helping to protect data before, during and after printing.
To find out more about PaperCut Hive, why not click here. And don’t forget to download their free education eBook. It’s available from papercut.com
This is a sponsored article on behalf of PaperCut.
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