Helsby High School

Managed Print Solutions

Helsby High School is a state-maintained secondary school in Northwest Cheshire, for pupils aged between 11 and 18. Founded in 1897, Helsby has grown significantly over the years. The school prides itself on high quality teaching, and the provision of tools and resources to its faculty and students.



The Challenge

Helsby High School wanted to reduce the 100 printers on-site to reduce costs whilst maintaining quality and efficiency to print in volume.



The Solution

Helsby High School standardised with Brother printer’s, choosing a selection of high-speed mono and colour lasers, A3 inkjets, and installed b-guard to help manage print costs.

The Benefit

By reducing the printer suite from 100 to just 52, Helsby High School have halved overall running costs and at the same time increased efficiency.

As part of a complete printing review by Rapid Technologies and Brother UK, Helsby High School introduced high-speed workgroup mono lasers (HL-6180DW), efficient colour laser printers (HL-4570CDW) and A3 inkjets to satisfy the requirements of the art department. Brother installed b-guard, its print management solution, to provide the IT department with complete visibility and control of their new printer suite. b-guard allows administrators to control costs by setting print quotas for students or departments, enforcing duplex printing and locking functions of a machine to certain users.

Steve Ford, Strategic ICT Manager at Helsby High School said “We need printers in school that can cope with high volume printing, reliably, efficiently and cost effectively. We print about 4 million copies in a year so speed and duplex printing is important, but so is quality.

Steve continued “By standardising to Brother printer’s, we’ve been able to halve the number of printers on site, considerably reducing our total cost of ownership with fewer printers to run and fewer consumables to purchase. Now using b-guard we can measure our print usage and adjust where printers are placed for maximum performance going forward. Rapid Technologies and Brother have delivered the cost savings we wanted without losing performance. In fact, Brother’s machines are proving so efficient, reliable and good print quality, we’re achieving far more with less.”

3 Years on….

This process in 2012 proved so popular and cost effective that Helsby have just embarked on replacing these printers this year with 50 x Brother HL-L9200CDWT Colour Laser Printer and 10 x Brother MFC-L9550CDWT Multifunction Printers and have managed to standardise on a single range of mono and colour cartridges.

In addition to that the school have recently signed a managed printer supplies agreement with Rapid Technologies which guarantees them a fixed low cost of Mono Printing at just over ½ p per copy and Colour Printing at less than 4p per copy. This cost includes consumables such as drums and represents excellent value to the school and further reduces their overall running costs.

Steve Ford concludes “The success of this project was reliant on good advice and continuous account management from Colin Birchall at Rapid Technologies and Pete Shackleton at Brother. It made it a very easy decision to renew our printer estate and consumable requirements with these trusted partners in place.“