Wifpli serves more than 60,000 clients and provides industry-focused accounting, tax, and consulting services to private and publicly held companies. The firm has grown to employ more than 1800 associates throughout 41 U.S. offices and two offices in India. Wifplii operates approximately 350 network printers and 50 USB printers throughout its locations and printed 16 million pages last year.
The Challenges Wifpli Faced
Wifpli is expected to expand in the coming year due to recent growth and mergers and acquisitions. They operated their print environment through traditional print servers, with each office having its own for a total of 40 IT-managed print servers. Every server was a single point of failure for that office’s print jobs and required monthly maintenance and reboots, draining resources and flooding the helpdesk.
Wifpli also uses tax software. That digital tax solution locked users to a server-side setting, which meant that for each print server, IT staff had to create a specialized duplicate print queue that users could access from their tax software. Even with this workaround, printing results were cumbersome and inconsistent.
Challenge 1: Improving the Manageability of the Print Environment
The first challenge Wifpli faced was that end users had no easy way to identify and install printers themselves. Every printer installation at an employee’s workstation required a call to the helpdesk, leading to specialized documentation and communications and additional challenges during the onboarding process for new users.
Another frustration they experienced was with the way their tax software handled printer settings. "That problem gradually became a bigger and bigger issue as tax season started getting underway and people got really frustrated," explained Michael Voegtline, an engineer analyst senior at Wifpli LLP. "Normally we print to a certain mailbox destination, and we print with standard settings. But for whatever reason, this tax application wasn't adhering to those settings. We worked with the tax software vendor to resolve the issue, but were unsuccessful and ultimately had to do an evaluation for every single office where Wifpli‘s tax software printed and determine how the users wanted their settings. Once that was decided, we had to set up a new print queue on every single print server to adhere to those settings, but even that didn’t solve the problem because people wanted to print from the tax software to different printers that were not set up with the separate print queue."
Ultimately, the default printing behavior lacked consistency, and exasperated end users had to call the helpdesk to troubleshoot the issue.
Challenge 2: Streamlining Printer Deployment and Removal
Due to Wifpli's continuing growth, the expansion and acquisition process is common and Voegtline regularly onboards entirely new locations in addition to individual employees. Under the distributed print server paradigm, he was forced to follow an arduous, time-consuming process every time an office was added.
"We request a server. Someone has to build it, someone has to patch it, and someone has to update it, all of which we track in our ticketing system. Then we need to install our management
agents and set up a backup if we need it, and from there it finally gets turned over to me, and I install the print services. Finally, I set up all the print devices and ports, downloaded all the drivers, and set up the print queues," he said.
"There is so much time and cost associated with managing 40 or more print servers including, purchasing all the agent and OS licenses, patching print servers, rebooting them, taking care of all of them during monthly maintenance, keeping them all up to date, making sure they're not vulnerable, and so on. That was a big reason we wanted to eliminate our print servers."
Challenge 3: Managing Centrally and With Minimal Effort
Wifpli contracts with a third-party vendor to service its printers to help lessen the load, but Voegtline said that the firm still wanted "the ability to get more information on our printing and our print costs" that couldn't easily be provided by a third-party vendor or the native print server features.
"The third-party vendor provides us reports, either ad hoc or quarterly, and we review those, but another thing we liked about PrinterLogic was the ability to get the real-time information we need to make decisions about printing and costs," he said.
PrinterLogic’s Solutions to Wifpli’s Problems
Solution 1
During the PrinterLogic pilot, Voegtline gave users who encountered printing problems a choice: They could stick to the old way (i.e., a separate print queue) or migrate to Vasion Print.
“Each and every time we set them up with PrinterLogic, it solved the problem, and no one had any further issues when printing to the tax software. Every time we deployed it, every time we had people using it, it just worked. We had very few problems in both locations, and printing
worked how we wanted it to when printing from the tax software using the PrinterLogic solution. That was probably the biggest thing that convinced us to take it from the pilot to firm-wide," he said.
"Most products work after a lot of tweaking and a bunch of learning and changes to making them work. PrinterLogic just worked out of the box. We didn't have the one-off printer problems that we used to have."
Because of PrinterLogic's Self-Service Installation Portal, the onboarding and routine installation process were also altered. Thanks to Vasion Print's dynamic installation features, new users can have printers automatically installed based on their IP address. Existing users can now simply visit an internal web page that allows them to easily identify and install nearby printers from a map of that office with a single click.
Solution 2
From the beginning, PrinterLogic's next-generation approach radically changed how much time Voegtline was required to invest in print management. It only took him one workday to fully integrate Vasion Print into the existing print environment.
"Now, every time we want to add another office when a merger or acquisition takes place, it's a matter of 15 minutes to pull those printers in. You point it to the print server that's there, you tell it what printers you want moved over, select the folder you want them installed to in PrinterLogic, click import, and in a few minutes, it's done. And if I want to get fancy, if you have an office layout diagram, I can just drop the map into the Self-Service Installation Portal and drag the printers where they are located on the map and it's ready to go.”
It also reframed his expectations about print management in the future once all print servers are eliminated. "Once they're all gone, we'll no longer have to patch these 40 servers. We won't have to reboot them. We won't have to monitor the print services to make sure they're up and available. We won't have to back them up. We won't have to do anything with them because they won't exist. The entire management of print servers will go away at that point, along with all the time and hassle, which is significant. We can just pull all of our printers into PrinterLogic, and off we go. In the end, Vasion Print eliminated the risk of print servers being a single point of failure and also helped reduce overall management costs for Wifpli."
Solution 3
PrinterLogic's built-in reporting tools surpass any similar print server functionality and provides detailed printing information broken down by users, departments, and devices, including USB-connected printers, which the firm had no information on before Vasion Print. When the third-party vendor supplied its own reports for the firm’s general maintenance agreements, Voegltine could associate that cost per page directly in Vasion Print's reporting interface, which allowed him to determine cost/benefit ratios for the firm's service contract as well as the individual devices that make up the print infrastructure.
"From there, I can see that somebody is using a single-function printer for all their tax returns—the difference in cost on that single-function printer is at least double that of a multi-function printer. So I can say to them, ‘Why have you printed so much on this single-function printer when there's a lower cost per page multifunction device right around the
corner?’ Most of the time they don’t even know that it makes a difference and opening that dialog with them can help the firm to reduce print costs with the real-time cost reporting built into PrinterLogic."
Solution 4
The PrinterLogic SaaS solution provides similar functions to the Vasion Print solution that Wifpli installed internally. Voegltine said they have begun working together to provide the same simplified print management experience for the firm’s clients so they can access many of the same benefits Wifpli has experienced with the internal implementation of Vasion Print.
Providing an option where a server is not required allows Wifpli to further assist clients with their move to the Azure Cloud. Wifpli Service and Delivery Manager Jason Vander Velde said, “Clients who want to go to the cloud are in need of a solution that can accommodate that move. PrinterLogic SaaS appears to be the solution.”
Solution 5
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 Wifpli's print consolidation, management, and compliance risks freeing their administrative team to concentrate on challenges elsewhere in their IT environment.
Wifpli’s Results
Wifpli has completed its pilot phase and, based on the time, effort, and costs already saved from this limited implementation, is ready to roll out PrinterLogic across all of the firm’s 43 offices in the United States and India.
"I received positive feedback from the tax manager and two office managers. My recommendation was to deploy the solution firm-wide and eliminate all print servers, and we are currently in the process of making that happen. Going forward, we will not have any print servers. As the firm expands and adds more printers, they'll just get added into Vasion Print," said Voegtline. The firm is also planning to pilot PrinterLogic's optional pull printing functionality for additional convenience and security in the future.
In fact, Wifpli is so certain of PrinterLogic's benefits that the firm plans to recommend it to its IT technology management consulting practice clients as well.
"We have an IT consulting practice and, as we go forward, the next steps are to show that this really is working for us, and it could certainly work for our clients as well. We're not doing print management the way we used to do it."