Centralizing Print Management Across a Large School Network: How CEWA Built Scale, Visibility, and Equity

In in the present day’s training surroundings, IT leaders juggle a fancy set of priorities: securing infrastructure, supporting lecturers and college students, and discovering efficiencies in each nook of operations. However one backend system that usually flies beneath the radar — printing — can turn into surprisingly expensive and chaotic when left unmanaged.

For Catholic Schooling Western Australia (CEWA), a state-wide community of 156 faculties serving greater than 83,000 college students and 12,000 employees, the problem was clear: a fragmented print surroundings with inconsistent instruments, restricted visibility, and rising administrative overheads.

The Problem of Scale and Fragmentation

Like many giant training techniques constructed over many years, CEWA’s printing infrastructure had grown organically. Particular person faculties ran a mixture of software program platforms, and IT employees on the central workplace discovered themselves attempting to handle this sprawl whereas nonetheless supporting day-to-day IT wants.

In school rooms, print output ranged from easy worksheets and handouts to administrative varieties and studying supplies. With no unified system, it was tough to trace utilization, implement safety insurance policies, or assist smaller, regional faculties entry the identical know-how as bigger campuses.

A Centralized Method to Print Administration

CEWA started its modernization journey by deploying PaperCut’s centralized print administration platform to deal with the complete scale and variety of its community. PaperCut was rolled out from the CEWA workplace and built-in with organizational identification providers like Azure, permitting centralized management whereas additionally letting native IT employees handle printers and customers inside their faculties.

In response to CEWA’s staff, this hybrid method — a mix of cloud flexibility and on-premises resilience — was important for faculties with older infrastructure and assorted connectivity. IT directors now handle printer deployment and person insurance policies from a single Paperut platform, and faculties may benefit from delegated administration with out rising central helpdesk burden.

Outcomes That Go Past Printing

The outcomes have been important. Right now, CEWA manages 831 printers throughout 91 areas from Broome to Albany and has processed greater than 23 million print jobs via its centralized system.

Past sheer numbers, CEWA’s IT staff highlights three strategic wins:

• Elevated Visibility and Reporting: With consolidated reporting instruments, the central workplace can monitor utilization patterns, monitor prices, and audit printing exercise. This knowledge isn’t simply “good to have” — it informs budgeting and operational selections that instantly have an effect on faculties’ backside strains.

• Operational Effectivity: Faculties that have been beforehand working standalone servers or legacy print techniques now function beneath a unified structure, decreasing the technical assist overhead on each central and native IT groups.

• Fairness of Entry: Smaller main faculties, as soon as constrained by outdated print techniques, now have entry to the identical know-how and administration instruments out there in bigger campuses — an essential consider a geographically dispersed training community.

Ben Beaton, Crew Chief of Digital Companies and Companion Engagement at CEWA, underscores the worth of this fairness. It’s not nearly know-how; it’s about guaranteeing that every one faculties — no matter dimension or location — can entry the instruments they should assist college students and employees successfully.

Print Administration as an IT Technique

CEWA’s journey speaks to a broader reality in training IT: even “mundane” techniques like printing can turn into strategic belongings when they’re standardized, seen, and centrally managed. For districts and networks considering related strikes, the CEWA expertise presents a roadmap for balancing centralized governance with native autonomy.

As training techniques look to stretch tight budgets, mitigate technical debt, and assist equitable studying environments, print administration could show to be one of many under-recognized levers of operational effectivity.