"Excellent service and great cost effective solutions and equipment. The print control we have with job-ticketing is most beneficial to students and staff."
– Shipley College Representative
The Background
Shipley College needed to source a supplier that could help make financial and security improvements across the fleet [college] within a short-time frame. Printing volumes, costs and waste can spiral out of control if left unchecked and Shipley College were seeking alternative solutions to manage print services to departments and students. They needed a way to track printing, apply quotas to students and become transparent to the finance department.
It was essential any new software solution supported tracking and charging activities for print, copy and scanning facilities across the college and apply differential charge profiles by job type (A4, A3, mono, colour, simplex or duplex) and the print device (printer, multi-functional-devices (MFD) or central reprographics department (CRD)) to the end users.
The software would need to integrate with the existing fleet of nine MFDs and two higher-volume devices located in the CRD one of which is mono and the other colour enabled. Additionally, the college required a further colour-enabled MFD in the Mill building to accommodate the growing numbers of users and this would need to run on the same print software and prevent jobs over a certain threshold size from being printed and redirect the job or the user to the CRD.
Ideally, they were looking for software upgrades to all MFDs and for the mono CRD device upgraded to colour enabled with finisher and ability to do produce pamphlet copies and desirably to have the full fleet colour enabled. Additionally, a job ticketing system to facilitate print job submission to the CRD and allow the operators to have control over how and when the jobs are released and be able to charge for offline production finishing features such as folding and binding.