St Mary’s Catholic High School

About St Mary's

St Mary’s Catholic High School has in the region of 1650 students, including sixth form pupils and 200 members of staff.

Having worked with several reprographics suppliers in the past, in the summer of 2011 the business and finance manager identified that too much money was being spent on consumables for the school.

Her objectives were to reduce costs but at the same time reduce the school’s carbon footprint in line with its environmental policy.

The search began to get a more appropriate reprographics contract in place and several suppliers were asked to come in to meet with the team at St. Mary’s and put proposals forward.

The Challenge

The school needed a cost-effective print solution that they could control and monitor, ensuring that the new equipment was suitable for current and future requirements.

In addition, they wanted to get the most energy-efficient machines and keep track instantly of their environmental impact.

It was important that the supplier chosen was able to offer rapid response for service calls and understood how schools worked.

The Solution

DMS Reprographics were selected as the preferred supplier for St. Mary’s. They had proposed a full managed print service for the school which would allow them to monitor print jobs using specialist software called PaperCut. Not only can the volume of print be monitored, but also areas where improved efficiency can be achieved.

Peter Seddon, Network Manager at St Mary’s said the early indication of the cost savings look good and the managed print service has definitely improved confidentiality risks and unnecessary printing.

Every member of staff can use their ID badge on the machines and their queued jobs from throughout the day will generate from a single place while they are stood at the machine.

The Feedback

Peter went on to say :

“The great thing is that the machines send page counts to DMS and the stock is monitored and replacement cartridges can be on site before they are urgently needed,” said Peter. “We’ve never used managed print before – previously we had to keep an eye on stock levels which was a big job. Having to maintain fairly accurate levels, plan in advance for large projects etc took a significant amount of time. Now it’s all uniform and we have the peace of mind knowing DMS are keeping things in order.”

The install at St Mary’s included:

• 12 colour printers
• 22 mono printers
• 2 A3 colour printers
• 4 multi-functional machines

“All I have to do is ring and, usually, it’s the same day delivery for consumables. DMS offer us an immediate and rapid response service. Because they’re a local company, if an issue can’t be resolved on the phone, then they come straight down and fix the problem,” adds Peter.

“To provide an example of the high levels of service that we receive from DMS: on one occasion, we had a really unusual problem of printing to only a few of the machines. DMS responded immediately and involved OKI, who worked closely with St. Mary’s, to get to the bottom of the problem. After sending error logs to Japan, it was agreed that OKI would write new firmware for the machines at St. Mary’s. Luckily this wasn’t necessary as the problem was identified as a network issue and was repaired quickly. Their help and support on an issue that was not related to their equipment was invaluable and it is nice to deal with organisations that will go that extra mile to provide a service.”