Banner Bank offers personal and business banking. With over 125 years of history, Banner Bank is the oldest saving and loan institution in the state of Washington. Its 104+ branches span Washington, Idaho, and Oregon and employ 1,200 people.
Banner Bank was experiencing rapid expansion and expected to double the number of employees and branches in the coming year. They knew they needed to upgrade their enterprise print environment to be proactive, not reactive, in response to their fast-paced growth. The company needed a print management solution that would integrate with their existing environment, streamline printer deployment, and simplify printing for IT staff and end users enough that it would no longer be a drain on resources.
Challenge 1: Optimizing the Citrix Printer Environment
The financial services industry is incredibly paper-intensive. Loan applications, mortgage documents, and balance statements need to be printed regularly. To improve the day-to-day process of printing required paperwork at each branch office, the company wanted to refine its existing Citrix environment by eliminating its high-maintenance print servers.
"Adding a new printer to a branch that had ten or more computers was extremely time-consuming and couldn’t be done easily during business hours without impacting the branch employees and the bank's customers," says Mike Currie, Senior Vice President and IT Infrastructure Manager at Banner Bank.
The Banner Bank IT team hoped that by installing the printers locally at the branch workstations, they would cut out the troublesome middlemen and reduce network throughout as well as installation time.
Challenge 2: Streamlining Printer Deployment and Removal
In the past 15 years, Banner Bank has grown from 38 branches to over 100. Their growth strategy sees them adding another 100+ locations within the next year, bringing their total number of sites to over 200, their total number of employees to approximately 2,400, and their regional distribution up to five states.
But their IT infrastructure has had to keep up with this whirlwind expansion while anticipating future mergers and acquisitions. The process of deploying printers in new branches and removing ones that are no longer useful had grown more complicated over time and was
no longer sustainable at the current rate of growth.
Challenge 3: Managing Centrally and With Minimal Effort
As the number and distribution of enterprise sites increase, so does the importance of centralized management. Prior to deploying PrinterLogic, Banner Bank IT staff would have to log into individual workstations to set up the printer port on each computer and install the driver. That can be a cumbersome process with just a single location. Banner Bank discovered with each additional location they added, it was an untenable process in the long term.
In addition to the company's static sites, Banner Bank had to account for its mobile workforce—employees who travel from branch to branch, dealing with a variety of customers or cases. Employees need to be able to seamlessly connect to the nearest printer, but with traditional print management solutions that process wasn’t feasible.
Solution 1
Banner Bank estimates that "99% of the bank's business systems [are] made available through a Citrix Virtual Apps environment using T1 WAN connections." The IT team saw PrinterLogic as a way to enhance the native WAN optimization of the Citrix application stream—and that's precisely what they got.
"All print jobs are streamed over an optimized Citrix network connection and then printed from the computer directly to the printer, versus printing from a print server in our data center over the WAN to the location's local printers," says Currie. "We have zero servers in our branches, so we have less server hardware to support and maintain."
And because PrinterLogic is now being used in place of those print servers, a new printer can easily be added to or removed from a branch with no downtime and without techs having to log into each computer.
Solution 2
"We are using PrinterLogic to make sure that a branch has all of the printers installed on a location's computers so that they can do their job and provide the expected service to Banner Bank's clients," says Currie. "Opening new branch or office locations is simplified with Vasion Print handling the printer installations on the fly."
He points to PrinterLogic's ongoing track record as evidence of how streamlined Banner Bank's operations have become enterprise-wide: "Having acquired or opened 16 branches in the last eight months was much easier for the deployment teams since they didn't have to manage any printer installations. And with 90 locations on the horizon over the next ten months, 'managing the printers' can be easily checked off the list of tasks that need to be completed."
Solution 3
PrinterLogic allowed the Banner Bank team to manage the company's entire printer network from a central location. They no longer struggle with the burden of IT administrators having to log into individual workstations to deploy printers, and traveling employees no longer have to call the helpdesk to walk through step-by-step installs of local printers. Thanks to Vasion Print's solution, those printers are automatically installed when an employee visits a new location.
"If you are looking for a high-value, low-cost centralized network print management solution to maintain, deploy, and support a mid-sized environment to a large-scale enterprise IT environment, you don't need to look any further than PrinterLogic," says Currie.
Solution 4
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 Banner Bank's print consolidation, management, and compliance risks freeing their administrative team to concentrate on challenges elsewhere in their IT environment.
After a lengthy proof-of-concept deployment, Banner Bank firmly decided in favor of PrinterLogic based on three criteria:
Total deployment cost(s) for the project
Ease of use, deployment, and management
Right fit for the enterprise
Finding the "right fit" meant seamless integration with the company's existing Citrix environment, rapid remote printer installation and removal to keep pace with the growing number of sites, and centralized routine management so easy it would almost be invisible. Even during the proof-of-concept phase, the results met or exceeded all the targets the Banner Bank team had envisioned.
"The FTE hours required to set up a new printer have dropped by 85%," says Currie. "That equates to 30 minutes to push out a printer versus up to six hours for a normal ten-computer branch. Which allows our support staff to focus on other tasks versus installing printers on computers."
Along with eliminating print servers and the added hardware and maintenance costs, Banner Bank's IT staff are also seeing a huge reduction in the number of printer-related helpdesk calls. Currie sums up the results more succinctly than any statistics: "PrinterLogic for the win!"