Background

Los Angeles Trade-Technical College (LATTC) is the oldest of the nine, public two-year colleges in the Los Angeles Community College district. It’s one of the largest community colleges in the country, serving 17,000 students per semester, with renowned vocational training for careers in industries such as culinary arts, fashion and construction trades. It also focuses on preparing students for the growing “green” workforce.

The Challenge

Screen Shot 2014-05-06 at 1.28.58 PMWith a variety of printers scattered across its 25-acre campus, serving 750 faculty and staff in addition to its student population, LATTC was doing a lot of printing. But that printing was costing the college too much, in time and expense.

The printing infrastructure was inefficient due to a proliferation of many non-networked personal desktop printers. Service, printer cartridge and paper costs were out of control. Service and support for LATTC’s printers were inconsistent, which not only frustrated students and staff but also required extensive time from the IT staff along with expensive service calls from vendors.

In addition, the college was using older production printers under multiple contracts. These printers weren’t networked to the central print shop on campus, creating frustrating lag times in producing high-volume jobs.

All of these issues conflicted with the college’s sustainability goals. The administration wanted to institute new processes that would reduce energy use and waste, use paper responsibly and measure its environmental benefits, all to reduce its carbon footprint—and its bottom line. It
was time to do something really different, and the objectives were clear: get a true picture of printer usage, update the college’s technology infrastructure, optimize printing services and streamline document processing overall to reduce expenses. Meeting these objectives would allow the college to reach its sustainability goals.

The Solution

Screen Shot 2014-05-06 at 1.28.12 PMA team of Xerox specialists worked closely with LATTC to develop an in-depth understanding of its current printing environment. The Xerox assessment covered printer usage throughout the campus and found that LATTC’s device-to- user ratio was approximately 3:1—and that about half of the IT staff’s time was spent servicing campus printers. Increased uptime, reliability and updating the infrastructure were all in order—“a campus-wide, clean sweep,” said Dr. Mary Gallagher, Vice President of Administrative Services at LATTC.

Xerox took action to help LATTC right-size its printing assets, streamline processes, increase device reliability, and cut waste and cost from each department’s budget. We replaced most personal printers with networked, multifunction devices. The Xerox® devices, some with vending stations, are located in key areas throughout campus, including the library and student labs. They deliver cost savings, provide security for proprietary information and reduce wasted time by every user.

We added a full-time Xerox DocuCare associate on campus to manage its fleet of multifunction devices, to ensure proactive monitoring, preventive maintenance and repair, and to provide support and training.

Then we implemented a Web portal to the campus print center for fast, easy submission of high-volume jobs to help manage print jobs and cut turnaround time.

Xerox® ColorQube® multifunction printers were added in key departments to produce compelling full-color documents with solid ink technology.

The Results

“When people each have a printer, they automatically print more,” said Dr. Gallagher. “Even though people were very attached to their printers, and there were some initial complaints, everyone now realizes how much better these devices and services are.”

Not only have the devices benefited users— they’ve also directly contributed to LATTC’s cost savings and green strategies. The device-to- user ratio is now approximately 8:1, reducing energy use and increasing printing efficiency. Paper and consumables consumption are down appreciably, while device availability is up. There’s more two-sided printing and less waste. The savings alone in printer cartridges is $250,000 annually, with savings of $1.5 million expected over the next five years.

The IT staff is now able to focus on mission- critical IT projects versus troubleshooting
the printers. And the students, especially, have noticed the printing reliability improvements on campus. “This creates good buzz and a competitive differentiator when it comes to recruiting new students to LATTC,” said Gallagher.

Eventually, Dr. Gallagher intends to institute an incentive program for students and faculty to make them more conscious of what they’re printing and further reduce waste and costs. The college also wants to do more scanning in the future, working with Xerox to provide additional document management and process improvements. These efforts will
lead to even less time and costs involved in managing documents digitally.

Click here to download this Xerox case study

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