Cloud printing cuts school district’s waste and enables flexible working

Cutting to the chase

Problem

Wasteful printing on multiple sites, no dedicated IT staff

Solution

PaperCut Hive fixes printing with just an internet connection

Outcome

Reduced waste and costs, no print servers required, agile hybrid working

DNEAT (Diocese of Norwich Education and Academies Trust) is a school trust for primary education in England’s Norfolk county and the Waveney Valley in Suffolk county.

As a multi-site organization of 35 schools with over 10,000 students and staff, but no dedicated IT team, DNEAT’s printing presented cost and waste problems. With the large printing volume of an entire school district, DNEAT was spending too much on print consumables and overfilling their paper waste baskets. Additionally, the entire district didn’t have resources for onsite infrastructure.

Saul Garthwaite, Year 3 teacher at Peterhouse Primary Academy and computing lead for DNEAT, was in charge of finding a built-for-cloud print management solution. The trust turned to PaperCut Hive to reduce DNEAT’s paper wastage, shrink their printing costs, and enable secure and convenient printing.

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I highly recommend PaperCut Hive in terms of conservation printing and ease-of-use."

- Saul Garthwaite,

Teacher & Computing Lead, Peterhouse Church of England Primary Academy, DNEAT

Problem

Wasteful printing on multiple sites, no dedicated IT staff

DNEAT has 35 sites, 10,000 students, and hundreds of printers, with no dedicated IT staff. Their printing problems began with 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,” says Saul Garthwaite, Year 3 teacher and computing lead at Peterhouse Primary Academy for DNEAT. “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,” says Saul.

In addition to wasteful printing, without a dedicated IT team, DNEAT required a cloud-only print management solution so that they did not need to maintain local print servers.

Solution

PaperCut Hive fixes printing with just an internet connection

PaperCut Hive met DNEAT’s requirements for a cloud-only print solution. Specialized 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, delete any duplicated print jobs, and ensure that print jobs only got released once their owner was at the printer. Additionally, the cloud printing functionality enabled remote off-site printing to optimize hybrid working and blended teaching.

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.

Outcome

Reduced waste and costs, no print servers required, agile hybrid working

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,” says Saul. “Keeping paper costs down means that money can be better placed elsewhere. Such as extra staffing or resources for the children.” 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.”