KAEFER Australia is part of the KAEFER Group, an international leader in turnkey construction, maintenance, and asset integrity services for the mining, energy, industrial, marine, defense, government, and construction industries.
The Challenge
Scattered Work Sites and Slow Connectivity
KAEFER, a construction and engineering company, has projects and work sites across Australia. Many of those sites are in remote areas with limited to no internet access. In places with internet availability, KAEFER often restricts electronic devices for security and confidentiality. KAEFER is ATEX-1 certified, which means it works in risky environments including gas plants and other controlled areas.
Without reliable access to documents on tablets or laptops, KAEFER employees print thousands of pages each month. They need to print work packages, construction documents, and diagrams to take with them across work sites. But printing came with its own set of problems.
Using print servers at every location was expensive and impractical. KAEFER tried one solution, but it was expensive and used a single central server in Perth, which caused spooling delays for KAEFER sites located thousands of miles away.
Lian Ping Tan, KAEFER’s APAC IT Lead, estimates that in some cases, print jobs could take over five minutes to spool. “We had users complaining about the delays, especially when they printed large files. They had to wait a very long time. If there were Wi-Fi issues or the traffic was bad that day, it could take even longer,” he says.
Printing was also expensive. Tan estimates the company spent as much as $15,000 AUD on printing each month at a single work site. One of the biggest expenses was unnecessary color printing, but KAEFER had no way to track that, which made it impossible to reduce.
KAEFER needed to solve these printing delays for their end users while also eliminating unnecessary printing costs.
The Solution
Serverless Printing
Instead of adding a print server in every location, KAEFER Australia went serverless with PrinterLogic. Serverless printing is faster and more efficient for end users. “Now that print jobs no longer go to a remote print server and they no longer need to spool, printing is much faster,” he says.
Apart from the speed, the biggest change is that users can add printers themselves with Self-Service Printing. In the past, IT had to enter an admin password to install a printer. Not every remote site was connected to the Active Directory, which meant that in some cases, the admin password didn’t work. The IT team had to connect to the VPN or remote to that team member’s desktop to install the printer.
PrinterLogic eliminated all of that. “They don’t need any admin rights to install a printer, which makes it a lot easier and faster,” Tan says. “We include instructions in employee orientation. It saves a lot of time for our team.”
Each printer is labeled so users can find and install the right one in just a few clicks. “Users can see where the printers are and check the serial number in PrinterLogic. It’s self-explanatory,” Tan adds.
When employees travel between different work sites, PrinterLogic automatically deploys printers by IP address. “The printers get installed automatically. The user doesn’t have to do anything. Once you install the first printer, the new printer gets installed every time they move to a new location.”
The IT team doesn’t need to install printer drivers every time they install a printer, and they can manage the company’s entire print infrastructure from one centralized console. With 500 users, the entire process is much more straightforward.
“Right now, I just have to go to the main console and update the printer driver. When a user logs in or refreshes the configuration, they get the new printer driver automatically,” Tan says. “It’s especially useful when we change printer brands.”
Reducing Color Printing
Lian Ping Tan changed the default print settings to black and white so that users have to manually change them when they need to print in color. “Some users will always print in color, and the reporting allows us to track that,” he says.
KAEFER’s IT team can also track which locations and departments are printing in color and encourage users to print in black and white when possible, cutting down on unnecessary spending and creating mechanisms for accountability.
PrinterLogic’s Advanced Reporting tells them how many pages are printed, allowing IT to estimate costs on their printer leases and upcoming invoices. “We call the web panel the printing odometer,” Tan says. “It has all of the information we need.”
Integrations With AWS
KAEFER’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 Kaefer Australia's print consolidation, management, and compliance risks, freeing their administrative team to concentrate on challenges elsewhere in their IT environment.
The Results
Controlled Costs and Instant Printing
KAEFER Australia’s IT team uses PrinterLogic reporting to control printing costs and reduce unnecessary color printing. For example, adding a license to PrinterLogic is 75% cheaper on average than what PrinterLogic's leading competitor charges for server-based print management.
Switching to centrally managed direct IP serverless printing made things much easier and faster for the KAEFER IT team.
“It’s a lot easier to deploy because we don’t need to install a server at every site. It’s also easier to make changes. We can delete printers, add printers, and deploy printers based on IP range.” Tan no longer has to waste time installing printers on users’ computers—it’s all automatic. “Without PrinterLogic, printing would be harder and more time-consuming.”
Users are happier, too. Even large print jobs take less than a minute to print, and spooler issues are nonexistent. “In the past, the greatest complaint from users was the delay when printing larger files. We don’t get negative feedback anymore,” Tan says.