Toshiba refresh NASUWT’s print estate to reduce paper usage by 70% and provide them with the tools and visibility to make management decisions.
National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers (NASUWT) provides unrivalled protection, benefits and support for teachers, from professional advice and legal support to High Street discounts and free training.
By ‘putting teachers first’, the NASUWT works to enhance the status of the teaching profession to deliver real improvements to teachers’ working lives, seeking to ensure they are recognised and rewarded as highly skilled professionals with working conditions that enable them to focus on their core role of teaching.
A long-term partnership
NASUWT has a long-term relationship with Toshiba who have been supplying and supporting their print infrastructure for over 20 years. This partnership is built on trust and confidence, with the Account Management team at Toshiba working closely with NASUWT, taking the time to fully understand their needs and objectives. Rob Boichat, Head of IT, talked about the reasons they had continued to select Toshiba as their print solution supplier, “Working with Toshiba, nothing is ever too much trouble, at every new iteration of our lease, they have always taken the time to look at our system requirements and tailor the proposal to fully meet our changing needs. The knowledge of their back-office team is immense, and they really make us feel like we are listened to, supporting us at every stage of the process from tender to procurement and installation and then with ongoing service throughout the term of the contract.”
Preparing to downsize
When the lease was recently due for renewal, as the incumbent supplier Toshiba were invited to tender. Stephen Miller, Account Manager at Toshiba, spoke about the approach to the tender response, “We always take the time to consider our customers new objectives and requirements and see how we can reduce costs as much as possible on their lease renewal. NASUWT had a clear agenda to lower printing across the business, make a switch from colour where feasible and improve overall visibility of their print usage with real-time live dashboards, for better management decision making.”
Embedded on the existing Toshiba devices, was print management solution, PaperCut. As NASUWT had been using PaperCut for the previous 5 years, Toshiba were able to review the historic data and make a proposal to help rationalise the overall estate, providing a considerable reduction in costs. They also proposed Intuitive BI dashboard software that would provide live updates with full visibility of the whole print estate for every print/copy/scan.
NASUWT were still reliant on printing, especially with reference to case bundles and employee claims, but the culture was changing. Staff were aware of the importance of using the scan to case file functionality that Toshiba had integrated in the last refresh of the estate, at the time removing the need for the 14 stand-alone PCs with full integration on the Toshiba print devices.
Following a full review of the tender responses NASUWT selected to renew the contract with Toshiba, Rob explained the reasons, “We already knew that we had the comfort factor of a smooth and easy transition, from our past experiences with Toshiba. In the tender renewal they had really taken the time to analyse the data and propose new hardware that would not only fully meet the specification within our brief, but enable us to downsize our estate and reduce the overall cost of our print solution by around 70%, saving around £75k per year. Their partnership with Intuitive BI would give us live dashboards so we could make use of the reporting tools for better management information to understand printing demands across the whole organisation.”
Data for the future
The roll-out was seamless with Toshiba managing the whole installation, and ensuring minimal disruption across the sites, and keeping Rob and his team informed at every stage of the project. Stephen commented on the process, “Our experienced team of engineers configure the machines in advance, and they agree all timings with the customer so the whole deployment is simply a plug and play, followed by the removal of the old equipment.”
With the addition of the Intuitive live dashboard the NASUWT management team can now drill-down with real-time data to see how print and scanning is being used at each of the sites. Sophie Sugarman, Senior Account Executive at Intuitive, talked about the benefits of the software for organisations like NASUWT, “Intuitive creates visibility of print, scan and copy activity for its customers, allowing them to identify expensive hotspot areas. Users can personalise dashboards tailoring the information to what they want to see, helping make it easier to manage the cost of printing, and identifying any devices that are being under or over utilised. There is also a whole host of environmental impact data, looking at CO2 and energy levels as well as how many trees have been saved over a two-year rolling period.”
The new installation has future-proofed print across the organisation, giving management the tools they need to control costs and change internal processes. Rob concluded on the project, “Toshiba never shied away from our core objective of reducing costs, they could have proposed a like for like replacement of our existing devices, but instead helped us to make saving beyond our expectations. They are so easy to work with and are aways flexible, honest with a can-do approach. Bringing in partners like Intuitive has given is a 360 degrees view of the organisation and will become an essential part of our planning for the future. We are looking forward to continuing working with Toshiba and wouldn’t hesitate to recommend them.”
