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Education
In the final part of our brief series on print in education,
we look at some of the trends in higher education.
Higher education institutions
are a special case compared
to primary and secondary
schools and commercial
organisations. Colleges and
universities will be subject to
many of the same pressures
as other organisations,
notably a need to cut costs
and reduce their carbon
footprint, but this is tempered
by a need to provide students
with the best possible service.
Compared to schools,
there is a much clearer
distinction between the
printing arrangements for
students and those for
lecturers and university/
college administration. Typically
requirements will be tackled/
optimised separately, with
student printing often taking
precedence. This, says Kyocera
public sector sales manager
Pauric Surlis, can sometimes
be for political reasons.
“Where budgets are
devolved to faculties and
departments, it makes it
difficult to implement a
horizontal strategy with
print. It tends to be easier for
educational establishments
to tackle student printing first
because that’s something
that’s paid for by students.
Different faculties have
different cultures and funding
sources and, in the case of
funding sources, will often have
strong views about what they
spend their money on,” he said.
Staff and administrative
printing will usually be provided
as part of a managed print
service – typically second
generation – which will do
everything that you would
expect from an MPS: reduce the
number of print devices used;
lower print volumes; eliminate
waste; cut the cost of print;
simplify device management
through just-in-time toner
deliveries and other measures;
and reduce CO2 emissions.
The latter is a particular
focus for higher education
institutions that have ambitious
carbon reduction targets,
typically in the region of a 43%
cut from 2005 levels by 2020.
According to Surlis, green
league tables, like the People &
Planet Green League, provide
an added incentive to eliminate
waste from print processes.
“Cutting carbon emissions
is much more important in
universities,” he said. “We see
strong evidence that there is a
real effort to be as high up the
Green league as possible. No
one wants to be in the ‘could
do better’ bracket.”
In-plant printing
University in-plants have
an important role to play in
reducing the cost of print, as
larger print jobs can be routed
to high volume machines and
output more quickly and more
cheaply on digital presses
and high volume MFPs. This
can be enforced through the
use of rules-based job routing
or marketed as a service to
print users, with web-to-print
job submission (you can read
how Design & Print Services
at Loughborough University is
using EFI’s Digital StoreFront for
just this purpose in the Winter
2012/2013 issue of
PrintIT
).
In-plants also have an
important part to play in the
production of prospectuses
and other university marketing
material. For Bob Pickles,
Director of Public Sector
Business Development and
Public Affairs at Canon,
in-plants are likely to be
called upon to provide more
sophisticated marketing
material as universities face a
fall in enrolments and have to
work harder to attract the best
students.
“There is a massive
opportunity around marketing.
We think there will be a big
move to the personalised
printing of university
prospectus documents. A
university may put together a
bespoke document that is Joe
Bloggs’ personal outlook on
these courses. There is a big
shift centred on the marketing
of universities,” he said.
Student printing
Cutting print costs is also a
requirement when its comes
to student printing, not so
much to ease pressure on
budgets but to reduce costs
for students. There is plenty
of scope for higher education
institutions to do this, as,
according to Surlis, “it’s not
unusual to see charges of 4-5p
per B&W page and 50p per
colour page in universities”.
Organisations that are able
to charge less for printing could
gain an advantage when trying
to attract students. Simon Hill,
Nuance Communications sales
director for UK & Ireland, cites
the case of a university that
gave every new student £50
of free printing as part of their
starter package. He adds that
universities must find the most
cost-effective way to produce
a document as “the last thing
they want is a student paying
hundreds of pounds for print.
They need to make sure the
base cost is the best it can be.”
For Kyocera’s Sulis, it is
just as important to provide
ease of use and a high quality
service, especially in an age
Middlesex University has implemented a mobile printing solution so that from July its students can
print from any device to any MFP. As part of its student printing optimisation programme, it has
doubled the number of devices they can print to from 20 to 40. Read the full case study in
Business
Info
Issue 113.
Printing in Education
Part Three: Higher Education