Barnsley College

Barnsley College provides vocational courses, A levels, and higher education to students aged from sixteen years. Operating across seven sites, including a brand new state-of-the-art building in the town centre, the college provides its students with top class facilities.

The mix of different machines and technologies at the college meant high costs in terms of service, support, consumables and energy. The college wanted to make printing more available to its students, reduce the number of desktop machines and introduce a more environmentally friendly print and copy strategy.

Carolynne Thurlbeck, Head of Administration at the college, told us; “our new building was not designed with much storage space so we also had to reduce our need to store toner and consumables for our printers.”

“Arena proposed a rationalised fleet of machines and simplified invoicing with all imaging, consumables and servicing included in one fixed monthly bill. The devices all contain clever software which alerts Arena when toner is running low so that new cartridges are sent automatically. The same software also notifies Arena of any technical issues so that an engineer can make a service call.

“We have made an annual saving of £100k – 25% of our overall annual print/copy budget - and our staff are more productive because they spend less time managing supplies and maintenance. Software monitors output and gives me a monthly report so I can allocate print and copy costs to our departments in minutes. This is a task that used to take me four hours each month and never gave me such an accurate result.”

Arena also installed a ‘follow me’ system at the college so that a print job, once sent to the network, can be released from any printer using a password. Carolynne commented; “this has reduced the amount of uncollected print jobs. The new printers are more environmentally friendly and Arena has also set them up to print documents in mono on both sides of the page as default, helping us to be more economical with toner and paper which all helps us to be ‘greener’.

“I’ve never come across a copier dealer that provides the level of service we get from Arena. An engineer is always close by and this means they reach us quickly so we don’t have to worry about our machines being out of action. They installed our new system swiftly and on schedule, keeping us informed throughout the process. There were suppliers I worried about when we moved into our new building but Arena was not one of them, I had real confidence in them. They regularly meet with us to ensure our needs are met and on more than one occasion they have gone above and beyond our expectations by providing extra printers at short notice to help us to prepare for Ofsted inspections. Our account manager, Tim Bye, showed a good understanding of the college from the start. He showed us that Arena understands how the public sector operates and has delivered the systems we needed at the right price.”

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