When Norwest Christian College installed new Toshiba devices with PaperCut, they reduced their per-page print costs by 35%, reduced wasted paper and simplified the print process for teachers.
Norwest Christian College, situated in Riverstone in Sydney’s northwest, educates students from the Early Learning years through to Year 12, under its ‘Building Purposeful Lives’ framework. The school has grown steadily since its inception 40 years ago and now provides a learning environment for 1300 students, and employs 220 staff.
The Challenge
As a modern school that embraces technology, students utilise a mix of screen-based and paper-based activities. Teachers understand the value of students literally putting pen to paper, requiring printed teaching materials and worksheets – and as volumes grew, so did costs.
The school has a longstanding relationship with Toshiba, who supply them with the multifunction devices they use to print, scan and copy paper documents. Mervyn Moodley, ICT Manager, realised that there was potential to harness the power of Toshiba’s technology to save the school cost and reduce waste.
The Solution
When it was time for the school to refresh its older MFDs and Toshiba proposed machines that included the ‘PaperCut’ print management software, the College realised that this was the solution they needed.
‘We had considered PaperCut a number of years earlier’, he says, ‘but at that time we had around half the students we have now, and we didn’t really need it. As the College has grown and our print volumes increased, particularly colour printing, we realised that our print costs and waste had increased faster than our student numbers.’
Toshiba installed the new printers over the summer break in January 2024 and configured PaperCut. The College kept one of their existing devices and Toshiba installed PaperCut on that one too. The new devices were faster, but the real savings came from PaperCut’s ‘Follow Me’ feature.
As the College has grown and our print volumes increased, particularly colour printing, we realised that our print costs and waste had increased faster than our student numbers.
As the College has grown and our print volumes increased, particularly colour printing, we realised that our print costs and waste had increased faster than our student numbers.
Mervyn Moodley, ICT Manager
With PaperCut’s Follow Me, teachers simply send their document to a central print queue, instead of a specific physical printer. The job is held in the queue until the teacher gets to a device and authenticates themself to ‘release’ the print job. This means that printing is only ever done once, saving paper, toner and power. If the teacher changes their mind about printing, they simply don’t release the job, and printing doesn’t take place, reducing the waste of unneeded printing.
The Results
‘The difference was noticeable immediately’, says Mervyn. ‘Print volumes went down significantly.’
Now that they have had the devices for over 12 months, Mervyn has been able to do a full year-on-year comparison assessment. ‘Our estimated savings on the per-page print cost is 35%’, he says. ‘That is a really significant saving. On top of that, we have the saving on the physical paper, which adds to the overall total. There is a higher lease cost, but even taking that into consideration we have made really valuable savings for the College – that’s real money that we can spend on other things for the College and our students.’
As well as the savings, teachers love the new system: ‘They don’t have to think about which printer to use, they simply walk up to the nearest or least busy one, authenticate and release their job. It makes their lives easier’ says Mervyn.
The College is not only impressed with Toshiba’s products, but with the quality and speed of their service. ‘We’ve always found that Toshiba technicians respond quickly. In an environment that prints as much as we do, things do occasionally go wrong. When we need support, we need it fast, and Toshiba delivers. I cannot fault their support.’
The Future
As the College continues to expand, and print requirements grow even further, the College sees Toshiba and PaperCut as critical partners in scaling cost-efficient printing. Money saved on printing can be used to further enhance the outstanding education offered by Norwest Christian College.
Norwest Christian College Case Study
