Laser Spine Institute Reduces Print-Related Support Calls to "Nearly Zero" with PrinterLogic
St. George, Utah (PRWEB) May 02, 2017 -- PrinterLogic, the leading server-less Enterprise Print Management solution that enables businesses to eliminate Windows print servers, announced today that Laser Spine Institute has shrunk the number of its print-related service desk calls to "nearly zero" and leveraged the efficiency and insight offered by PrinterLogic's next-generation software to transform its multi-location print environment.
Like many health care providers, Laser Spine Institute had been using print servers as its enterprise printing backbone for many years. However, issues such as limited insight into the print environment, a lack of centralized management, heavy wide-area network (WAN) print traffic and regular printing errors began to compound over time despite their best efforts to mitigate them. The frequency of print-related calls to the service desk increased as overall manageability spiraled downward.
After concluding that "[w]hat we were doing wasn't convenient for anyone – not for our administrators or our end users," according to Jeff Alway, IT Support Services Manager at Laser Spine Institute, the organization researched alternative print management solutions and quickly implemented PrinterLogic.
"We didn't see anything that fit our needs as well as PrinterLogic. PrinterLogic came out on top by far," he says.
Laser Spine Institute operates seven distinct geographically distributed locations across the United States and employs close to 1,000 staff. To equip its staff and deliver the best quality of care to its patients, the organization maintained a print infrastructure of four print servers and roughly 250 printers. But managing that environment was a "very complicated process," says Alway, especially across its multiple locations.
"Before PrinterLogic, we had no central management capabilities. Any time we made a change to a printer, we would spend hours making the same change on the main print servers, on each of the 20 to 30 terminal servers. That does not even take into account the challenges of ensuring the end users’ workstations were properly configured."
By implementing PrinterLogic's printer and driver management solution, Laser Spine Institute aimed to redress the many challenges it faced regarding the management of its print servers, excessive print-related WAN traffic, and the high volume of printer-related service desk calls.
Managing printers in a distributed organization
Administering printers and queues across Laser Spine Institute's multiple locations using print servers was "pretty rough," says Alway. "We had one main print server, and then we had multiple print servers in our other facilities. However, we had constant issues with all of them. On the smaller print servers, we had persistent issues with the drivers being incorrect and the print jobs failing."
There were dozens of other print-related issues too: routine installations, deployments, updates and print server migrations. Each of those was solved quickly and effectively by PrinterLogic's centralized management console. Laser Spine Institute is now able to manage all of its printers anywhere in the enterprise from a single pane of glass.
"Printer deployments are much quicker now. When we opened three new facilities and configured 20 to 30 printers per site, we simply exported the data from PrinterLogic and changed the names to reflect the new location. This has cut deployment time from three days to one hour," says Alway. "PrinterLogic has been a game changer for us when it comes to managing printers. We haven't had to think about print management for months."
Empowering frustrated and dissatisfied end users
To improve remote management, Alway says that Laser Spine Institute "ultimately attempted to centralize on one main print server" — a common consolidation strategy used by organizations with multiple physical locations.
Unfortunately, because remote print jobs then were routed to the central server and back, there were "continual issues with printing latency," he says. "So we'd commonly see scenarios in which users were waiting two or three minutes for their jobs to print. Imagine how frustrating that can be for users who are trying to focus on patient care."
Alway also notes that a 10MB PDF would often bloat by up to 50 times after being rendered by the central print spooler. This placed a heavy load on the WAN and slowed the speed of WAN-reliant data traffic. End users quickly lost patience with the protracted print times as well as the complex printer installation processes. That led to frequent service desk calls.
With PrinterLogic and its proven direct IP printing backbone, Laser Spine Institute's end users now print directly from endpoint devices to printers. This means that print jobs do not cross the WAN. Plus end users are safely empowered to perform routine tasks like printer installation themselves, thanks to PrinterLogic's intuitive self-service portal.
The number of print-related calls to the service desk has since plummeted. "If we ripped out PrinterLogic tomorrow, our call volume would increase dramatically," says Alway. "Users love it."
Gaining insight needed for intelligent optimizations
Laser Spine Institute knew that cost-saving print optimizations were needed, but the print servers could only provide a limited overview of usage and activity. Furthermore, the organization was too tied up with basic print management to concentrate on print-related data aggregation and analysis.
The organization has since begun leveraging PrinterLogic's built-in reporting features to "track and minimize color printing." Using these tools, Alway says he "was able to quickly generate a report of users who were printing color disproportionately to the rest of their department and identify the color printers that were actually needed."
PrinterLogic didn't just provide the information necessary to plan efficiency initiatives. Its streamlined approach to print management also allowed Alway and his team to carry them out. Via the management console, they could easily delete color printer profiles and redirect users to black-and-white printer profiles. "This task was something I was able to accomplish in two minutes — but would have taken at least 40 hours to do in the past," he says.
"Many vendors have made promises for a dramatic increase in efficiency but were not able to deliver on the promise. That was not the case with PrinterLogic. It has allowed Laser Spine Institute to drastically reduce IT resource requirements for printing. It was a great investment and we really couldn't live without it at this point."
About PrinterLogic
Thousands of enterprises use PrinterLogic's patent-pending printer and driver management platform to deliver Mobile, Pull and Virtual printing, while eliminating print servers and providing a self-service portal that empowers end users to install their own printers. PrinterLogic recently won the 2017 Buyers Laboratory prestigious Pick award as Outstanding Enterprise Print Environment Platform. In addition, the company has been recognized twice as one of the fastest growing companies in North America – being ranked number 141 overall (and 8th amongst software vendors) on the Inc. 5000 and number 107 on the Deloitte Fast 500. For more information, or for a free trial, please visit http://www.printerlogic.com. Questions? Watch our video or connect with us on Twitter at @PrinterLogic or follow us on Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram and Google+.
PrinterLogic Media Relations, PrinterLogic, http://www.printerlogic.com, +1 435-243-7397, [email protected]
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