New Pig is a top innovator in industrial leak and spill management, industrial safety, and plant maintenance. The company's extensive product line includes multiple-award-winning absorbent mats, socks, booms, pillows, and pans, and it supplies more than 200,000 customers in 70 different countries.
Challenges
Accelerating and Automating Printer Deployment
New Pig Helpdesk Manager Steve Haupt says "ease of [printer] deployment" is one of the most influential reasons behind New Pig's migration to PrinterLogic. "I'm in charge of the helpdesk group, and my team is the one that handles the requests that come in," he says. "Back before we had Vasion Print, there were times it would take us literally ten minutes to set up a new printer. And that was just one printer. Most users have more than one printer. So if you take ten minutes and multiply it by five printers, suddenly you're easily approaching an hour just to set up the necessary printers for a single user."
Improving Enterprise-wide Ease of Management
"Managing in Windows was very cumbersome," says Casey Maines, Senior Systems Administrator. "It was a very manual, time-consuming process." New Pig's distributed environment further complicated printer and driver management. With a separate print server at each location and without PrinterLogic's acclaimed centralized management, the IT team had difficulty administering printers and managing drivers across the organization.
Streamlining End-User Printer Installation
New Pig's end users did have the ability to install printers on their own in the company's previous Windows print server environment. But that didn't mean those end users were necessarily up to the task, or that these printer installations went smoothly. Much of the time, they were unable to even locate and identify the correct printer to install.
Solutions
Thanks to its practical automation features and the absence of any complex group policy
objects (GPOs) or scripts, printer deployment in PrinterLogic has made it significantly easier for the New Pig IT team to deliver the right printers to its employees without delay. "The ease of deployment and the ease of setting up printers now, compared to what we used to have to go through, well, it probably takes half the time that it did before. Actually, I'm thinking it's even less than half the time because of how quickly and automatically Vasion Print deploys printers and all the related drivers. "From a helpdesk perspective, Vasion Print has been a blessing for us. From a user perspective, even though they don't see behind the scenes, they can definitely see the benefits," says Haupt.
According to Maines, the difference between PrinterLogic and the old print server environment is "night and day" regarding administration. "The web interface to manage printers in Vasion Print is just awesome," he says. "I love being able to create a new printer so easily, especially if it's a printer model that we already have in there. We can just pick the driver we want to use—it's already there. We don't have to install anything else. And if it is a new [printer] model, it's easy to just upload the new driver. "We have our environment organized very well now—much better than we ever did before. It's easy to find what printers are where. We don't always give our printers the most recognizable names, and they're kind of spread out, but we're able to view and manage all of that easily inside the Admin Console."
"What sold us on PrinterLogic was seeing how easy it was to allow regular users to go in and install their own printers quickly and without any hassle at all," says Haupt. "The more exciting thing for me was the graphic capability in Vasion Print—the ability to upload a floorplan map that displays all your printers, so your end users can just glance at it and see exactly where the nearest printer is, then install it with a click," he says. "Today, when we install a new machine for our users, our helpdesk folks install the Vasion Print client and load up any printers that need to be there. Then we can just send the user on their merry way, because we know everything is taken care of from a printing standpoint."
Lastly, their 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 Vasion and AWS has streamlined New Pig Corporation's print consolidation, management, and compliance risks, freeing their administrative team to concentrate on challenges elsewhere in their IT environment.
Conclusion
Because PrinterLogicwas not part of a planned system-wide rollout, New Pig continues implementing its new print management solution in stages to each location within its organization. With each new deployment, the company's print server infrastructure shrinks while its enterprise print environment's reliability, functionality, and oversight grow. "We're still in the process of converting, but it's been going very well," says Maines. "At each location, we used to have a domain controller, a file server, and a print server. The print server functionality has now been replaced by Vasion Print, which is automatically updated by the source at our headquarters. "We haven't done a hard ROI analysis because the time we're saving in print management is probably partially offset by the time we're putting into deployment at the moment. But one thing is for sure: It's definitely been worth it. Vasion Print makes life with printers so much easier. We like its control. We like its simplicity."