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April 2, 2020

How to Reduce Printing Costs in Your School

Despite the importance of education, schools are constantly pressured to cut costs. School administrators face the difficult task of needing to improve efficiency while somehow lowering the budget. It can be difficult to make the right decisions that will not only protect the bottom line, but also set up the organization for success down the line.

So, where should educators be looking to both save and improve existing processes? Read on to learn how a printing solution for schools could cut costs while improving overall efficiency.

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Printing in Education is Unique

The educational environment makes for uniquely complex printing. There's a massive guest user-base: the students. Students require printers for their education but aren't always able to assign the correct ones for print jobs. The Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) trend complicates printing further by adding more devices to the equation. This unique printing environment, when mismanaged, can become a major cost center.

With Complexity Comes Cost

The complexity of printing in education caused by massive numbers of guest users and inadequate management creates an increased cost. This cost comes in two forms:

Salary Waste

Salary waste is a significant cost factor of school-wide printing issues. Printing from within most VDI environments is cumbersome and time consuming. IT admins get held back by having to create GPOs or scripts to make printing work properly. In addition, assigning and delivering those printers out to users can take hours and hours to manage.

If the admin doesn't get to the task at hand due to increases in overhead, the responsibility of managing printing issues often falls on educators. Of course, that's the last thing teachers want to — or should have to — worry about in the classroom.

Resource Waste

Print jobs can not only cripple school operations but also lead to resource waste: we're all familiar with bins next to the printer filled with misprinted documents. The environmental implications are evident; plus, with ink alone being one of the most expensive liquids in the world, costs can add up quickly.

Many errors come in the form of misprints to wrong locations, printer jams, and privacy violations. Privacy violations in particular can cost a school a lot more than just a few sheets of paper. Further, these issues detract from quality of service, causing a slower network that never seems to do what it's supposed to do for optimal school operations.

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A print management solution can help

In an ideal world, schools could handle these issues in-house. However, it's just not simple to do so, even for organizations high on the IT maturity curve. For schools, the most cost-effective solution is this: implement a solution to do the heavy lifting on printing.

With the right print management solution in place, your school can improve workflows, decrease overhead and positively affect student outcomes.

Mobile Printing

Now more than ever, students use their phones for school, and they often need to print on-the-fly. Advanced print management features, such as mobile, remote and badge release printing, allow students to print anywhere on campus. Plus, students can expect a reliable UX that enhances their learning experience.

Centralized Management

With centralized print management, print errors can be reduced immediately. The right users will be automatically assigned the right printers for their desktops, mobile-phones or tablets. By eliminating overhead, educators and IT admins can return to their jobs, while printing efficiently, thus improving operations school-wide.

Plus, advanced print management solutions enable secure access and data retrieval from multiple devices, applications and locations — decreasing the number of data silos rampant in education.

Quality of Service (QoS)

A reliable network and QoS are vital to the workflows in education. However, roaming profiles, unsecured desktops and limited device connectivity can hinder a school's network, increasing downtime and overhead.

A print management solution can support a fast and reliable network within your school or district. By helping to resolve print management and security issues, the right solution can result in a more secure and stable network, reduced support effort and cost and a vastly better user experience.

To learn more about how to reduce printing costs at your school, read our post on The Value of Mobile Device Printing in Higher-Education or hear from our experts in our Tricerat Education Webinar.

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