Meeting High Services Expectations at Harrogate Borough Council

With a large print fleet, Harrogate Borough Council need a copy and print supplier with a strong support function in place.

After recently renewing their contract with Arena for a second time, Joy Morrison, Corporate Workplace and Facilities Manager at Harrogate Borough Council, told us about her experience.

“Even though we might have a fantastic relationship with a supplier, we still have to go through a framework, so we used the Procurement for Housing framework as we did the first time. We evaluated the bids and Arena came out on top, so we’ve been able to carry on the relationship for another few years.”

“The second install was mainly a refresh of devices which we already had. As part of this project however, we looked at where we needed to tweak things. For example, we downgraded sites which didn’t need such high specification machines or upgraded those which did. Our devices are all over the district, so in terms of project management it needed a hands-on approach. If there was anything our account manager or project manager couldn’t help us with, they got someone else involved that could, so it’s worked well.”

Harrogate Borough Council use PaperCut on their devices, print management software which helps to reduce print costs and track usage, making managing a large print fleet easier.

“We mainly use PaperCut from an agile working point of view, for the follow-me print functionality. We’re going to look at other ways to use it too such as using print rules to reduce unnecessary colour prints and save on our costs. A colleague and I also use it to look at the background information and reporting tools. It’s useful to highlight our problem areas, as we’ve been using it to see which departments print heavily to know where we should start tackling first.”

The devices have been working well for the Council, however when issues do arise, the Arena helpdesk team have ensured they are resolved swiftly.

“I’ve never heard any complaints about the helpdesk and they’ve always been very quick to send somebody out to us when we’ve needed it. My colleague logs support calls online which is great as it gives us a full audit trail, so it works well as far as I’m aware.”

When asked if Joy would recommend Arena to other organisations, she responded by saying, “I would, yes. On the whole, we’ve had a very positive experience and a very good working relationship which we’ve had for a number of years now.”