Case Study: Shawnee Mission School District

Reducing reliance on paper and leading the way in digital learning.

About Shawnee Mission School District

Shawnee Mission School District (SMSD) is the third largest school district in Kansas. They serve approximately 28,000 students and have 4,100 teachers and staff that work in the district’s 33 elementary schools, five middle schools, one alternative site and five high schools.

"The long-term goal was to change the way we teach. To get our staff out of the mindset of print and into an environment where we share and collaborate digitally. Ricoh helped us make that happen."
Drew Lane
Executive director of information and communication technologies
Shawnee Mission School District

Challenge

Shawnee Mission School District (SMSD) faced many challenges in trying to move beyond the traditional, paper-based education model. Their schools were reliant on paper processes and there were no rules or constraints around printing. The district had no visibility into output volumes, authentication to determine heavy users at each school or prevent information from landing in the wrong hands.

Worse yet, the district’s onsite print center was losing money and volumes were declining, thanks in part to antiquated processes and severely slow delivery times.

To address these issues, SMSD's goals included:

Transforming teaching and learning from a paper-reliant, print-heavy environment to digital learning.
Lowering the costs of maintaining a desktop printing fleet.
Improving print governance to reduce their staggering amounts of extraneous paper.
Encouraging greater electronic collaboration.
Revitalizing their print center.
Reducing their environmental impact.

Solution

We used both hardware and software to help make the school district as efficient and tech-savvy as possible, while still containing costs. SMSD
has been transformed to a digital teaching and learning environment
whose operations are more streamlined and cost-effective.

Our solutions addressed the school district’s challenges:

We removed 99 percent of the district’s local desktop printers and replaced them with 270 Ricoh multifunction printers (MFPs), color printers and production printers.
MFPs are connected to our Integrated Cloud Environment (ICE), so staff can scan documents directly to a cloud service, rather than paper printing. Scanned information can be accessed electronically from any device. Teachers send documents electronically to students, who have immediate access on their school-issued iPad or MacBook Air.
Equitrac® Express print audit software holds teachers and administrators accountable for what they print. Users have to authenticate at the device via their badges to retrieve their document.
Customized reports show precisely who is printing, what they are printing and which device they are using.
Secured pull print style functionality allows SMSD staff to print anywhere on campus, instead of being limited to one or two MFPs.
Our Managed Services took over the day-to-day operations of the district’s print center to streamline the workflow and increase efficiency.
Teachers send print jobs electronically in a single step using the TRAC web submission tool. The automated system submits print jobs in seconds and teachers track progress of jobs in real time online.

Result

In the first year of the program, SMSD saw a nearly 50 percent drop in printing and expects another 50 percent reduction in the second year.

Other outcomes that support SMSD's goals of efficiency and cost savings:

In the first year of their digital learning initiative, SMSD cut hard costs by $600,000, achieved $150,000 in paper savings, reduced their carbon footprint by 90 percent and saved an estimated 5,281 trees.
In the 3,264 calls to SMSD’s help desk related to printers. That number has been reduced by 90 percent, as we provide full support for the MFPs.
The district’s print center is now a centralized printing hub and vital resource for the district, run seamlessly by Ricoh Managed Services.
Volume at the center skyrocketed from 1,700 jobs to more than 12,000 jobs.
Turnaround times have dramatically improved. It used to take the print center an average of seven days to complete a job. Now, delivery times are two days or less—with 99.3 percent completed on time or ahead of the requested delivery date.