Graham is an employee-owned construction company with over 3,500 employees. It has been in business for 99 years and offers general contracting, design-build, construction management, and public-private partnership (P3) services to the buildings, industrial, and infrastructure sectors across North America.
THE CHALLENGE
Managing Printing for Over 3,500 Employees
As a large construction company with over 300 active projects across North America, Graham uses over 300 printers, including several at each job site and in the company’s 23 permanent offices. Each job site requires printers so that architects, engineers, and foremen can easily print schematics and building specs and carry them wherever they’re needed. Nick Turvey is Graham’s Director of IT Services and oversees a team of 19 who are responsible for all service delivery to an organization of 3,500 employees. His scope includes everything from the service desk to network provisioning and PC procurements.
Printing was a small but often frustrating part of the IT team’s schedule. Managing print servers and drivers, as well as troubleshooting printer issues for the entire organization, was time-consuming and inefficient. Turvey estimates that the IT team spent at least five hours each
month on printers, with anywhere from 10 to 20 printer tickets popping up in the service desk’s queue each week. Printer problems are usually easy to troubleshoot. However, many Graham employees don’t work at a desk, which makes fixing even simple issues complicated.
As Turvey explains, “Our customers are in and out of trailers on a job site. They aren’t sitting by the printer. We had to contact the customer, coordinate with them, and then finally sit down and fix the printing issue. It was very time-consuming.”
In the construction industry, printing delays lead to project delays. “Anytime there’s a delay in getting what you need, it can cause delays in the project itself. You can load specs on a screen, but you can’t take that screen out on the job site and annotate it easily, especially if you’re using a desktop computer,” Turvey says.
Different sites have different printing requirements, causing Graham to use varying printers between locations. Managing different drivers added another layer of complication to their print server management. Misconfigured drivers would cause print jobs to malfunction, wasting hundreds of pages at a time and frustrating users. Slow internet connections also delay print jobs. “If we had any connectivity issues, the print job would fail, and the customer would have to start over. It was challenging,” Turvey says.
THE SOLUTION
A Centralized View of Printing
PrinterLogic’s cloud-native serverless SaaS printing solution gives Graham a single view of everything they need. Centrally managed direct IP printing means they no longer rely on internet connectivity for printing, and they’ve completely eliminated print job delays.
They used PrinterLogic’s templates to set up default formats for their different printer models. End users no longer have to worry about misconfigured print jobs that were wasting paper and time. “PrinterLogic allowed us to create that default setup very quickly and very easily for our end users,” Turvey says.
As IT Director, Nick Turvey uses Microsoft Intune to deploy a standard image across devices and add PrinterLogic’s extensions into each computer build. “When my users get their computers, it only takes them 30 minutes to set up and have everything they need, including PrinterLogic. They set up their email, choose their printers, and it’s done. We don’t have to figure out which printer they need. It’s all right there at their fingertips. That’s extremely valuable to me, and it’s certainly valuable to our employees,” Turvey says.
Self-Serve User Experience
With PrinterLogic’s Self-Service Installation Portal, Graham employees set up their individual printers with just a few clicks, eliminating printer installation requests and the need for IT support. The portal detects users’ locations using their IP addresses and shows them a floor plan with available printers.
“It allows our users to self-manage, so they don’t have to put in a ticket to IT and wait for someone in IT to call them back. It’ll be up and running and ready to go right away,” says Turvey. He uses that same portal to set up printing when he visits other branches. “It’s very convenient to be able to arrive at another office, open my PrinterLogic application in the taskbar, and get set up instantly,” he adds.
Last year, Graham transitioned from PrinterLogic’s on-prem solution to the cloud-native version. During the transition, Turvey saw firsthand how much users relied on PrinterLogic. “If printing was down for even a very short period, our users were not happy about it,” he says. “We had tickets asking, ‘Where’s my PrinterLogic? Where did it go?’ They had no idea how to set up a printer without it.”
Integrations With AWS
Graham’s PrinterLogic instance lives on a SaaS solution that's also integrated with 60+ AWS technologies such as VPC, EC2, and S3. The powerful partnership between PrinterLogic and AWS has streamlined Graham Construction's print consolidation, management, and compliance risks, freeing their administrative team to concentrate on challenges elsewhere in their IT environment.
THE RESULTS
More IT time is available for “value-added” activities. PrinterLogic has helped Graham eliminate print servers, saving at least 60 hours of IT time each year. That’s at least $6,000 CAD in server and overhead costs saved annually. Setting up a new printer now takes less than 15 minutes, a process that would have taken at least 45 minutes in the past to set up a queue and download and test the drivers. For a company with over 300 printers, that time adds up quickly. Printer setup helpdesk tickets are a thing of the past. “We don’t get support tickets for printer setup. Printing works,” Turvey says.
The IT team has more time to spend on issues that matter to the organization, including managing over 300 applications and fixing network outages quickly to minimize the impact on business operations. “Fixing a printing issue can be time-consuming, but I don’t consider it a value-add support because printing is pretty basic,” Turvey says. “Reducing printing tickets allows for my employees to do more of that value-added support.”
For Nick Turvey and the rest of the Graham team, life would be more challenging without PrinterLogic. “PrinterLogic is probably one of the best solutions I’ve ever worked with in my 30 years in IT. It is definitely something that my customers rely on and appreciate because it allows them to just do what they need to do and do it quickly.”