Main Content
Croydon College offers further and higher education to 16,000 full and part-time students in South London. Spanning three sites, and a total of 39,000 square metres, the college employs 1,000 academic and support staff.
Croydon College in South London.
To efficiently manage a large suite of printers spread over three sites
Printing problems are easily identified and resolved quickly
BR-Admin has revolutionised the work of Croydon College’s IT support team
The Challenge
Croydon College has a huge IT need. In PC terms, there are 2,100 machines on site. And in terms of printers, the college runs 280 mono laser machines, predominantly Brother.
Croydon College is a long-term customer of Brother, having first specified the manufacturer’s printers in the late 1980s. The relationship has continued to the present day due to a strong working partnership between the two parties, and Brother’s low overall cost of ownership – affordable hardware and low cost per copy are core Brother strengths.
The college has its own 14-strong IT support team, headed up by IT Development Manager, Paul Marsden. For printer maintenance, the college employs a dedicated IT hardware engineer, Simon Cox.
With so many printers spread out across a wide geographical area – from one corner of the site to another is approximately a quarter of a mile – Simon found that most of his days were spent out on calls. He would receive several jobs in the morning, and then often attend them with no real idea what problems he would be facing when he got there.
Simon would have to carry a large toolbox and spare parts with him, and would often have to attend the same job twice, once to identify the problem, and once more to take whatever parts were needed to solve it.
The Solution
All Brother networked printers are supported by BR-Admin Professional network administration software – this was introduced to Croydon College around four years ago.
Using web-based software, the system means that the status of every printer of the network can be monitored by a network administrator on their own PC. Issues like paper jams and low toner can be identified just by looking at the screen.
The Benefit
Said Simon: “When users call me to highlight a problem, I can go into BR-Admin and load that machine’s icon onto my desktop. I can then view a web page for that machine which will tell me exactly what is happening.
“Depending on the nature of the problem, I can talk the user through solving the issue themselves, or I can then go out with the appropriate consumables, parts or tools.”
For Simon, the key benefit of BR-Admin, has been saving time.
He said: “I used to spend most of my day out of the office, and much of that was spent identifying simple and easily-solved problems. Now, BR-Admin does that for me and I have the time to look at and resolve bigger issues.”
