Liverpool John Moores saves £100.000 annually with print management

Equitrac Express® brings accountability and control to printed output on any campus, making printing convenient and secure while reducing costs and waste. Compatible with leading MFPs, campus card or cash payment systems, Equitrac Express provides tools to enforce student print quotas, charge for printed output and promote sustainability.

The Challenge

Unmanaged printing is a common problem among universities.
To help overcome that problem, Liverpool John Moore's partnered with Equitrac to deploy a print management project to help reduce print/copy volume, use lower cost-per-page devices, and gain better overall management of its printing and copying resources.

The university was facing department-level pressure to cut budgets. An evaluation of its printer fleet revealed a number of inefficiences: different hardware vendors, multiple suppliers for consumables/services, a reliance on high cost-per-page desktop printers, and even different systems for charging students. Each year, the university was printing 60 million pages per year at a total cost of £1.7 million.

The Solution

• Cost reduction - Equitrac Rules & Routing automatically redirect large print jobs to high-volume devices, with default settings at black and white.
  
  
• Electronic payments - When a student accesses an MFP evice via his/her ID card, Equitrac automatically deducts the charge from the appropriate account.
  
  
• Secure Mobility - Equitrac Follow-You Printing allows staff and students to retrieve their print job anywhere on the three campuses, ensuring convenience, flexibility and document security.
  
  

Results to date

LJMU has saved an estimated £310.000 over a three-year period. Printed pages have dropped 70%, and use of recycled paper and Follow-You Printing has reduced the university’s carbon footprint dramatically. Additional cost savings comes from redirecting jobs to the print room and sourcing supplies through a single vendor.

As a result of this project, LMJU now serves as a role model to other universities in the region, advising them on how to set up their IT infrastructure to effectively control print and copy costs.