How Blackwoods Cut Print Management Times by 95%
Claudia Soto-Saavedra
May 13, 2026
4 mins
For most businesses, printing is a background task. For Blackwoods, it was a bottleneck consuming hours every day.
Blackwoods is one of Australia's largest industrial and safety suppliers, with 2,300 staff, 70 sites, and over 800 printers. The company’s printing issues were far beyond a minor inconvenience. Their legacy print infrastructure was actively slowing down the business. The following is a look at what that meant in practice, and how they solved it.
The Problems Were Hard To Ignore
Matthew Horvat, IT Operations Manager at Blackwoods, doesn't sugarcoat it. The freight and dispatch teams were waiting up to two minutes to print a single job. Long enough that employees would click print and walk away, hoping something came out by the time they got back.
In a high-volume dispatch environment, two minutes per print job compounds fast. Hundreds of jobs daily across dozens of sites became a drag throughout the company. In a business where every KPI revolves around getting goods out the door, slow printing has real operational consequences.
Login latency made it worse. Group Policy Objects (GPOs) tied to overloaded legacy print servers were causing delays of up to 45 minutes just to sign in to a computer. Employees couldn't start their day, and every hour IT spent troubleshooting was an hour not spent on anything else.
On top of that, Blackwoods was bleeding money on a per-user licensing model they couldn't accurately manage. Users who printed once a quarter still needed a license. Because the model was so difficult to track, the team kept over-allocating just to keep things running.
The deeper frustration was that none of this was new. The same IT tickets, the same workarounds, the same conversations with end users who had simply expected printing to be unreliable.
The Fix Wasn't Complicated—It Was Overdue
Blackwoods partnered with Vasion to move print deployment off legacy servers and into the cloud, eliminating the centralized print server bottleneck and the overloaded group policies that came with it.
The rollout covered all 70 sites in about a month with minimal project management and disruption to end users. They later added the Vasion Advanced Security Add-on, consolidating a separate vendor solution into a single platform.
When asked about his reaction to the deployment timeline, Horvat said, "I still didn't believe it until I did it."
The Results Are the Story
The improvements were immediate across every area that had been causing problems.
- Print times: 2 minutes to 2 seconds. In dispatch, this kind of reduction means employees stop waiting, queues stop backing up, and work moves at the pace the business requires.
- Login delays: cut by 80%. For a workforce that starts every shift by logging into a computer, that reduction has a real cumulative impact on daily. Most employees no longer think about it, which is the intended outcome.
- Licensing costs: down 60%–70%. The licensing costs moved from per user to per printer model. This finally reflected how the business actually used printing, and the over-allocation problem disappeared with it.
Perhaps the most telling, is that a single administrator now manages over 1,000 printers nationwide using no-touch management. As Horvat said, “[The end users are] just super happy.”
The Pattern Here Is Familiar
Blackwoods' situation is not uncommon. Legacy print servers, GPO headaches, and slow job processing are recurring issues for IT teams managing distributed environments at scale. IT staff focus on keeping things running rather than addressing the underlying infrastructure.
Blackwoods made a different choice. One month, 70 sites, and a set of problems they lived with for years was resolved.
For teams still working through the same printing issues quarter after quarter, the question worth asking is whether the current approach is solving the right problem. In manufacturing, unreliable printing doesn't just frustrate IT. It slows production lines, delays shipments, and quietly drives up operational costs.
Stop waiting for print jobs and start freeing IT resources. See how your team can achieve the same results as Blackwoods.