One Supplier to Rule Them: Benefits of Academy Trust-Wide Contracts

In the complex world of Multi-Academy Trusts (MATs), where cost-efficiency, streamlined administration, and high-quality education are paramount, every decision matters. One often overlooked area is printing - an essential service that, when managed effectively, can yield surprising benefits! Now, if you’re a regular reader you might be thinking, “Come on Parmi, give it a rest with all this printer talk, you’re now talking about Multi-Academy Trusts?!” The problem is I can’t when I know the level of savings that are sitting right within your reach and the monumental leap in service you can have! 

You see, for most print suppliers, education is just a small side of their business as they’re geared up to focus on corporate customers. We all know that schools are not like commercial companies, so why should the same rules apply when it comes to printing contracts, prices, and print / colour usage limits? The answer is, they shouldn’t!

After talking with a MAT last week, I was inspired to put a little bit of what we talked about into this blog so that you can understand just what changing your print supplier could offer to your Trust.

Pour yourself a fresh cup of tea and strap in as we delve into the transformative potential of why the right print supplier will be the 'one supplier to rule them all'.

Turning Cost Savings into Educational Impact 

When you’re talking to suppliers who are stuck in the old model of per page printed pricing, you can find savings but they’re rarely exciting. From what schools tell us, shopping around the traditional suppliers brings a 5-10% saving which although not unwelcome, just doesn’t move the needle enough in these cash strapped times. 

At Eco Printers we use a completely different approach which can save serious money. Having developed unique print technology, we offer our schools unlimited print allowances for an annual fixed price. The impact of this is that you could be saving between 35-50% from your annual printing bill. For the average primary school, a 50% saving is going to be at least £10,000 per year, the average secondary you could be looking at 2-3x that. At that level of saving, you can free up money that you can reinvest into educational resources or initiatives that can deliver a tangible impact. 

Bringing this back to a Trust-wide supplier allows you to multiple those savings leading to significant cost savings. Rather than each Academy negotiating and managing separate contracts, each looking to get a 5-10% better deal, joining Eco Printers could half your print costs. If you’ve got a number of schools in the Trust, or you’re growing in the future, you could be quickly looking at saving upwards of £100,000 per year, every year!

“Once we started using Eco Printers our reprographics costs halved”

Anne - Bursar / Hillhouse CoFe School

Standardise to Reduce Breakdowns, Down-time and Callouts. 

Ensuring all Academies within the Trust use the same set of print equipment simplifies maintenance, reduces the time required for staff training, and ensures a consistent quality of output across all Academies. 

Increasingly, Trust management teams are taking on more maintenance and administration work for their schools, freeing up school admin teams to have more time to focus on educational related tasks.

Eco Printers use the latest heat-free technology which means our printers have fewer moving parts and operate at much lower temperatures. The benefit for schools is that Eco Printers last longer and break down far less frequently.

However, should one of our printers need a visit from an engineer, the joy for the Trust is that you have a single point of contact regardless of which school needs support. As we schedule proactive servicing (we don’t wait until a breakdown to visit your school), having multiple schools within a Trust using Eco Printers means we can visit multiple sites on one day, minimising the amount of scheduling you or the school needs to do to keep up with servicing.

“Customer service is exceptional, swift response if any issues arise and regular servicing really helps to maintain the printers in school."

Vanessa - Business Manager / St Martin’s Academy.

Easier Management and Eco Friendly

A Trust-wide supplier streamlines the management and administration process. Instead of dealing with multiple suppliers, invoices, and contracts, there's just one, which saves substantial administrative time and effort. All your schools operate under one set of terms and conditions which makes things easier across the board.

This also reduces the complexity of monitoring and managing print levels if this is something you’re interested in doing. The Eco Printer approach is to offer unlimited printing for a fixed price, but we’re also aware that many schools are increasingly eco-focused. We don’t want schools having to make the difficult trade-off between printing learning resources or doing their part for the environment which is why we’re eco-focused ourselves. 

The biggest environmental polluter from the printing industry is not the paper used, but the ink / toner required. Traditional print suppliers use cartridge / toner based machines, and once the ink has run out, these plastic consumables typically end up in landfill. As traditional printers need to produce high levels of heat to print, the plastic ink consumables are made to withstand high temperatures which unfortunately means they’re very difficult and expensive to recycle. Eco Printers don’t use replacement ink consumables which means there is no leftover waste to go to the landfill. That’s a big win for the environment!

The second issue is traditional heat based printers require more energy and output more greenhouse gases than the latest heat-free model (those which we use). This is why you can be waiting anywhere from 30 seconds upwards for the school printer to leap into life after you’ve pressed print. The printer is warming up and that requires energy. Eco Printers use 72% less energy per print than the traditional alternative, so even without reducing the amount you print, you can still make a positive difference to your environmental impact.

As you can see, from cost savings to boosting your eco credentials, there are a lot of benefits to switching print suppliers. If you’d like to know more about how we work with schools and Trusts, get in touch and we can arrange the next steps. Thanks for joining me today and look forward to sharing more printing tips and insights with you next time.