Case Study: Millersville University

Selling more than boxes, Ricoh helped Millersville navigate print migration quickly, cost-effectively.

About Millersville University

Millersville University is a top-ranked public university in central Pennsylvania with more than 8,700 students and nearly 900 faculty and staff. They require an extensive fleet of output devices throughout their scenic campus and they procure devices through the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education (PASSHE).

"We were wasting tens of thousands of dollars every year because we stuck with inefficient strategies and equipment long after they should have been discarded."
Ken Dearstyne
Associate Vice President of Finance and Administration
Millersville University

Challenge

Add to Board Professor and college student at laptop

It was a common scenario for a university with a decentralized printing strategy and state-approved procurement guidelines. There were hundreds of black-and-white MFPs and printers scattered across campus from several different vendors, of various ages and fewer than 20 percent were networked. Outdated, standalone devices compromised performance and school officials were increasingly concerned about security and data integrity. Maintenance was also a nightmare, as most service contracts were expired or non-existent—and the scattershot approach was taxing the school's financial resources. Millersville desperately needed to upgrade their printing fleet, but lacked the resources for optimal efficiency.

Solution

Our team wanted to do more than sell output devices. We recommended a comprehensive analysis to understand the university's printing infrastructure and optimize efficiency throughout campus. But they were skeptical—having unsuccessfully gone through a similar exercise years earlier with a different provider.

Knowledge was key to transforming the university's printing infrastructure. To overcome the university's resistance to comprehensive analysis, we:

Conducted a smaller-scale needs analysis of individual departments
Installed several MFPs to establish a foundation for more significant initiatives and campus-wide analysis
Mapped 30 printers and surveyed all the buildings to identify each device
Recommended a centralized strategy and device consolidation

In the end, we determined the university could eliminate unnecessary devices by installing our networked MFPs that combine printing, copying, scanning and faxing for faster, more efficient performance—at a fraction of the per-page cost.

Result

The university was impressed with our analysis, recommendations and advanced MFP technology. We replaced MFPs more than five years old with new networked MFPs that brought advanced capabilities and significant outcomes:

Reduce paper consumption with automatic duplexing (output approximately 1.2 million fewer pages per year)
Operate more energy efficiently (60 percent savings in energy costs)
Lower cost to print (from 3 cents per page to 1.2 cents)
Print in color or black-and-white
Transition from paper-based processes to an electronic workflow
Document a wide range of data usage to justify centralized fleet management
Overwrite latent data temporarily stored on the hard drive to help protect confidential information
Easier maintenance of the centralized fleet

"Ricoh has shown us that a wise print migration investment can pay off now—and in the future," said Ken Dearstyne, associate vice president of finance and administration at Millersville University.

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