The challenge at that time was not only managing the increased costs of colour printing, but the software development involved in handling the print macros for the different paper trays and types of documents.

Jonathan Splatt, IT Manager, says

“We have more than 20 printing devices across three locations. We had created our own macros in Word to enable users to easily print various types of documents, for example, a headed letter along with a plain copy for the file. It became apparent that we couldn’t sustain the amount of time needed from the IT team to re-write the macros for any new and additional printing devices. The macros also had to be deployed across 150 PCs which was a pain to update and manage, so we wanted a system that could more easily be centrally managed and deployed to users.

Kappris was the solution that we chose, and it continues to be the software of choice many years later.

We wanted a system that made it easy for users to print the jobs that they wanted without having to alter any settings and allowed us to keep accidental printing and wastage to a minimum. Kappris allows us to write complex printing configurations for document types and publish those print options to the users in a very easy way.

If we were to lose Kappris then I would dread to think how many hours it would take for us find alternative solutions.”

Reduced printing is a natural by-product

Kappris enforces default print settings and one of the easiest processes to gain quick benefit from is email printing from Outlook. Kappris will print, by default, only the last two emails in a thread and duplex the job automatically. There are options for the users to change this should they need to, but the default setting has reduced paper and print wastage immediately.

Jonathan says, “Previously the users would have had to manually choose which pages they wanted to print – which they invariably never did – so a lot of paper ended up in the confidential waste bin or in a file which ultimately was going to end up in paid storage.”

Digital stationery is now the default

The firm wanted to protect its brand and ensure that all letters that were sent electronically were on letterhead. Kappris made it easy for the users to print documents to electronic stationery and, in fact, this became the default selection.

Jonathan Splatt explains: “Some of our staff were printing letters on letterhead and then scanning in the documents so they could attach a PDF to an email. This is obviously very time consuming and we found that sending electronic stationery is becoming more normal practice.

We are now able to include our electronic stationary by default, enabling letters to be turned into a pdf and attached to an email. If a user wishes to print the same letter to pre-printed stationary, we have configured Kappris to automatically hide the electronic letterhead at the point of printing. Our users get the best of both worlds and they can choose at the end of the process whether they want a post letter or an email letter.

Standardisation of the Kappris system makes it very easy for the users regardless of which printer they’re using.”