In 2014, the Managed Print Services program was introduced to campus, allowing many departments to cut down on both environmental and economic costs.
The program was created to cut down on costs and paper use by standardizing and assessing print services throughout the different departments
on campus.
Ryan Hourigan, director of the School of Music, said his department was one of the first to switch over to the Managed Print Services three years ago.
Hourigan said the switch was an adjustment for the department since previously, individual printers and supplies were paid for through the department’s yearly technology budget. Due to consolidation of printers from individual to more department-oriented printers, departments now pay per-print fees to the university.
“It’s money taken out of our supplies and equipment budget versus our technology budget, and our supplies and equipment budget hasn’t changed for 30-something years,” Hourigan said. “It’s just a new line item that we weren’t expecting, whereas, in previous years, we would just buy printers and ink out of our yearly faculty technology refresh.”
Hourigan said the department had no idea how to project the cost of the unit for the year when the program was first enacted, but he thinks the program is a good change in terms of environmental concerns.
Professors were encouraged to post things like syllabuses on Blackboard so students may print it out themselves if they choose to.
Hourigan said the department has saved roughly $6,000 since the policy change.
Fawn Gary, interim associate vice president for information technology, said in an email while the Managed Print Services haven’t been completely implemented, they have been expanded.
“There are now two different deployments of the program — the first being Employee Print Smart, and the second being Student Print Smart,” Gary said.
Student Print Smart was launched during the 2016-17 academic year with 19 printers placed throughout the campus.
Gary said students printed 3.5 million pages of paper, while faculty printed 2.1 million pages during the 2016-17 academic year.
Still, Gary said students saved 478,421 pages of paper while faculty saved 89,993 pages.
Gary said a true dollar amount of savings cannot be assessed to show how much money has been saved by the printing policies yet.
“Moving forward, we will be able to show the actual cost of printing by each department as we gather the data through our print management software,” Gary said.
Contact Andrew Harp with comments at adharp@bsu.edu or on Twitter at @retr0andrew.
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