B-W's Tim Winner Talks Big Savings on District Copiers, Printers

Tim Winner, the 's directory of technology, provided the B-W School Board with a recommendation on Wednesday night that Winner says would save the school district around $84,000 per year in printing/copying costs.

Winner suggested to the board that it enter the district into a new, five-year printing/copying agreement with the company ComDoc that would cost approximately $24,600 per month, or $295,200 per year.

The district's current printing/copying contract is costing approximately $31,600 per month, or $379,200 per year, Winner said.

Winner's projected savings are based on the district maintaining its current rate of copying and printing, which Winner says is 900,000 black and white impressions per month and 12,000 color impressions per month. (One impression equals one side of inked paper.) Fifteen percent of those impressions come from printing jobs, Winner said, while the other 85 percent come from copying.

UPDATE: Those 900,000 black and white impressions do not include 700,000 more black and white impressions handled by the district's copy center. In total, the district runs through 1,600,000 black and white impressions per month, according to Winner.

Among the improvements cited by Winner under the new proposed contract with ComDoc, which would begin on April 1, 2012—as compared to the district's current contract—are equipment sized to better meet known volume needs; the addition of another black and white printer/copier at ; the ability for all new devices to scan images in high resolution and in color; the capabilities of Web job submission, archiving and retrieving; and user authentication and "follow-me" printing (key fobs).

The key fobs, Winner explained, would allow easier tracking of individuals' usage of district printers/copiers and would help users to better identify which print jobs are theirs without having to sort through other users' jobs.

Winner also said that, under his proposed contract with ComDoc, the B-W School District would own all of the software sent by that company and that all staples for print and copy jobs would be included in the base price of that contract. ComDoc would also be responsible for the removal of hardware at the end of the contract term and the destruction of the district's data once the hardware is removed.

School board member Larry Pantuso asked Winner if his proposed contract with ComDoc includes the individual printers used by workers throughout the district, of which Winner said there are 111.

Winner said that it does not and that the cost to the district of using those printers is about $14,000 per year. Those individual printers (each usually connected to one employee's computer) are part of a separate contract that the district has with ComDoc already.

Winner explained that the bulk of that $14,000 is spent on ink for those printers.

Pantuso suggested that Winner try to group those 111 printers into his newly proposed contract with ComDoc in an effort to save on that $14,000 per year.

Winner said that he will try to do so and that he will address the board again in January about his proposal.

The board will decide whether or not to approve Winner's recommendation at a later date.

Check back with the Baldwin-Whitehall Patch later on Thursday for more odds and ends from Wednesday night's school board meeting.

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