According to Papanui High School’s Executive Office Mrs Gaye Parlane, striving to have the very best leading edge administration systems and office technology has resulted in tremendous benefits for the teaching staff and students.
Established in 1936, Papanui High School has shared in the growth of North Christchurch and is a central point in that community.
The School is a large co-educational secondary school with a student population exceeding 1600 pupils. The roll includes an increasing number of Māori and Pacific students as well as international students.
“We offer a broad curriculum and a wide choice of subjects delivered by innovative, committed staff and a real determination that the needs of every student in the school will be met through our ‘Full Service’ philosophy,” said Gaye.
She said that according to the latest Education Review Office (ERO) report, achievement information shows that students make good progress from the time they begin Year 9. By Year 11, students are achieving in the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) at rates significantly higher than for students in similar schools.
“We have a balanced student body covering the full range of academic, socio economic, and ethnic groups and offer first rate modern facilities. The school is undergoing a multimillion dollar building development programme and our I.C.T. Resources are excellent,” she said.
Gaye said that her role as Executive Officer has recently been expanded and that she has taken on a number of projects to improve the efficiency of the administration of the school under the guidance of the School’s Principal Mr Jeff Smith. “One of these projects was to assess the way we could improve the area of printing, copying, scanning and faxing as it was a high cost area for the school,” said Gaye.
“We had been with the same office equipment supplier for more than twenty years and I felt that we should conduct a review of the available technology. I was sure by going to the market we could achieve a better outcome for the School in not only cost savings but also by obtaining the latest cutting edge technology.”
She said that the School invited three companies to provide a competitive solution for their needs.
“After a rigorous process we decided to award the contract to replace our existing equipment with a fleet of Toshiba e-STUDIO multi function devices (MFD’s) through Toshiba’s dealer Business Distributors Limited (BDL),” said Gaye. Business Distributors Limited is a local New Zealand Christchurch based family business and has been operating in the Canterbury Region for the past 43 years.
She said that dealing with Ben Huston and Daryl Hancox from BDL was an absolute pleasure and that she couldn’t speak highly enough about their professionalism.
Any wonder then that BDL was recently awarded the 2015 Toshiba Dealer of the Year’: Competing against 92 dealers throughout Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands.
“What I liked about Ben and Daryl’s approach is that they didn’t come in just to replace the existing equipment with similar type equipment rather they talked with us and all the Department Head’s about our needs. That meant the solution they offered with a wide variety of Toshiba e- STUDIO MFD’s resulted in us ending up with a more cost effective and better technology solution than we had at the time,” she said.
“Implementation of the new Toshiba e-STUDIO’s, which were strategically networked throughout the school, all happened on one Saturday. The next Monday morning we simply came in and everything worked perfectly. “The fact we had no teething problems and were up and running from the get go greatly impressed our Principal Jeff Smith as well as our IT staff.
“BDL even put a technician into the school for the first week just to ensure any questions that came up were answered. But the e-STUDIO interfaces which are standard across the range of MFD’s is so user friendly we really didn’t need much support at all in learning to operate the e-STUDIOs.
“Because each machine has standardised pricing per copy we are now saving $1600 a month on our copy costs over the previous supplier arrangement.”
But according to Gaye the most impressive feature that BDL offered was the PaperCut MF print management software.
“This meant that managing and compiling user account codes so individual departments can be billed for what they use now only takes a matter of minutes when it used to take a staff member two or more days to manually read all the machines codes and compile into a spreadsheet.
“The Toshiba e-STUDIO MFD’s and software technology coupled with BDL’s great support has given us a great outcome for the school.”