North Lindsey College chooses WorkForce Pro WP-4015 DN

Its education services are described as “outstanding” by its latest Ofsted report. The college is committed to giving its 4,000 further education and higher education students and staff high-quality IT services. As part of the investment, it recently updated its fleet of 160 printers used in classrooms.

Andrew Parker, Support & Infrastructure Manager says;

“Over time we had come to run a fleet of 40 or so different inkjets and 10 different lasers. While all were from a well-known manufacturer, this mix of printers was an expensive headache.For instance, when a printer model changed – around every 12 months – the cartridge changed too. This meant that we were stocking 70 different types of cartridge. At one point, we had retired several models of one printer but found we had enough consumables left over to support ten of these printers for a year when we only had five of that model left.”

In addition, print quality of the older printers was deteriorating and the college found that using non-genuine toner cartridges reduced reliability. Also, the laser printers had ink drums that had to be rotated when cartridges needed changing. It was a fiddly process that meant IT had to attend in most instances to change cartridges.
 

Colleagues recommended Epson

As part of the review process Andrew spoke to colleagues from the UK’s Northern Colleges IT Group and one of his IT partners, Panacea. Both sources recommended testing Epson’s WorkForce Pro business inkjet printers.

After trialing a test model for a month, Andrew commented, “We were looking for one printer that we could standardise on for all our classrooms and which provided a longer-term stable system – we didn’t want to get into a situation where we were again managing hundreds of cartridges. When the Epson WorkForce Pro was recommended, I had doubts. I knew the print quality would be good. But inkjet printers in my mind can be expensive to run, a little slow and cartridges need to be changed often. I was wrong.”
 

Impressive performance

Andrew’s team decided to replace to all of its classroom printers with WorkForce Pro models. He says:

“Print quality was excellent and fast too which is important as most students tend to print one or two pages so you can have a long queue of jobs printing small volumes. Another important aspect is that the WorkForce Pro printers are solid, business-grade printers, which look and feel like a laser. If they looked like inkjets people may be reluctant to use them, while the solid build gives our lecturers confidence that we have invested in robust and reliable technology.”

The college has already installed the first 100 printers with the other 60 to follow this year. It has also implemented PaperCut software on each printer to provide students with print credits to encourage people to print conservatively.

As well as the strong performance of the fleet of WorkForce Pro, the college is seeing significant financial benefits.
 

Major cost savings

The WorkForce Pros cost less than a third of the amount that the college was paying for its laser printers. Cost savings extend further as the IT team only has to manage one type of cartridge. Moreover, as cartridges are easy to change, staff are happy to do this – saving the IT team time. Cartridges also last much longer – a month on average – and cost £34 each with four required. This compares to £100 per cartridge (£400 to replace all colours) for its older laser printers.

Andrew comments, “Working in education we have to be conscious of cost and the new system really delivers, Cost per page is 3.4p so costs have fallen by between 50 and 65 per cent. The great thing is that we have achieved this while moving to genuine ink supplies. Epson also plans to support and provide cartridges for the printers for three to five years. So we have a stable, long-term print platform. Also, as the cost of buying a unit is so affordable we can comfortably buy new printers if needs be and we have a clear idea of what our print costs will be moving forward. The Epson WorkForce Pro printers have changed my opinion of what inkjets can do; I strongly recommend them.”