Teaching MPS pays for NSW schools

An audit organised by the NSW Department of Education and Communities (DEC) uncovered 49,000 different print devices, producing 1.2 billion A4 pages a year across 2,200 schools. Although DEC had negotiated a printer and copier contract which was offering 15 to 67 per cent savings off list price, it wasn’t being used much.

“Schools have limited budgets and lots of demands,” explains DEC chief procurement officer Paul Hopkins. “Replacing ageing photocopiers wasn’t high on their agendas. So schools were running increasingly creaky old machines, paying for service, suffering breakdowns and expensive consumables. There had to be a better way.”

Hopkins is the architect of NSW DEC’s Entrepreneurial Procurement initiative, which aims to transform historical sourcing and panel arrangements by coming up with fresh delivery models and payment options to drive value to the end user faster.

The Pay as You Print Optimisation Programme, which is now being offered to NSW Government schools, is one of the first manifestations of that initiative. The program allows schools to move to managed print services; offload the ownership, maintenance and management of their copiers and printers to Fuji Xerox; and be charged a per-month fee based on their print volume.

Over the four year life of the contract, and assuming the 1.2 billion pages a year output is maintained, the deal will be worth $447 million. If there is an 85 per cent take- up of the scheme, DEC expects it will save $127 million compared to the previous cost of printing.

And what’s in it for the schools? “They get brand new machines, a lower cost per print, and almost no upfront costs,” says Hopkins. Schools also get a single number to call to report faults, and don’t have to manage consumables; that’s all automatically provided by Fuji Xerox.

The programme has not been mandated; schools have the option of buying and managing their own printers or moving to the Fuji Xerox MPS alternative. But it has proved popular: since the scheme was announced in August last year, 1100 schools have so far registered, 400 are signed on for installations, and 350 currently awaiting review.

Both schools and DEC benefit as the programme allows it to amortise risk over the entire printer fleet and achieve efficiency- based cost savings to feed back to Treasury. Just those first 300 schools represent a $17 million saving over four years.

Feraaz Abrahams, the initial project manager, says that some schools are choosing to go that bit further and use swipe cards to pass print costs onto parents.

Michele Moore, the current project manager, says that once schools have received their audit report and recommendations – which often includes Fuji Xerox buying back from the school any existing printers – they are free to decide whether to proceed with the MPS solution as proposed, tweak the proposed solution, or stick with their existing printers.

“Schools want to take in the human factor – they may want a single printer for the counsellor,” she explains, adding that the model also ensures social equity – as all schools and pupils are treated equally in terms of access to the MPS.

DEC has also negotiated SLAs on behalf of schools, although it acknowledges there are some variations. For example, a school in remote White Cliffs could not expect printer repair in the same time as a school in Wollongong. Also, schools which want more complex printer networks will pay a higher per page rate than schools with simpler needs.

While it’s less than a year since the programme was unveiled, Hopkins is already thinking ahead. It’s a good deal now – but could get even better because the more schools that adopt it, the greater will be DEC’s leverage in negotiating the next deal. But he acknowledges that by then the demand for printing may have shifted as more tablets and notebooks percolate into schools, which will alter the print profile of education.

While DEC has been a pioneer of MPS in NSW, Hopkins said the government was now looking at introducing a similar type of contract for the whole of government. – Beverley Head

This case study originally ran in the April-May 2012 issue of Government Technology Review