The University of Talca decided to change their printing service for one more efficient with the purpose to eliminate the bottleneck in communication rooms and labs where the students waited in long lines at the computers ready to print and wich download their works and then print.

"We had a very rudimentary printing service in which students waited long lines for use it", said Luis Valenzuela, director of Operations, direction of information technology, University of Talca. "In addition to its slowness and little efficiency, the quality of printed pages was very low, so the students had a awful service concept".

The University also wanted to reduce or eliminate the costs associated to maintenance of printers, supplies, support staff, maintenance of machines and equipment replacement.

ACT S.A in partnership with Lexmark, presented the best solution in terms of costs, service, flexibility and quality of the solution. To this solution was developed a printing solution based in quota to provide printing service to over 7.000 students on campus of Talca and Curicó where replaced 28 old machines of different brands for 20 equipment Lexmark printing model T644 were located in the computer labs and high traffic sites that serve students and over 500 computers. In addition the solution offers benefits such as inmediate on-site technical support, supplies permanent, stocks of spare parts and replacement machines. 

Similarly, the solution included the installation of two kiosks that offer the printing service selfservice mode for 24 hours. "The new solution was ready in march 2009, which coincided with the return to classes in the first semester, said Luis Valenzuela.

Before using printing service, the University recorded a print volume of nearly 2 millions pages per semester; today, this figure has increased due to the ease use of solution that eliminated the congestion in data centers. "The long lines of students  against printing terminals are thing of the past", said Luis Valenzuela. Today, a student authenticates to any computer on the campus and send their documents to print with great efficiency and quality.

Also, has increased purchase additional print quota, because the students quickly deplete their quota of 360 pages per semester, which is becoming more profitable this cost center at the University.     

"Now we have a printing system high availability by eliminating downtime for bad operation or lack of supplies", said Luis Valenzuela. "Likewise, the concept of students has changed for better by raising the perception of our services".

The University of Talca controls with more efficiently their printing activity and obtain management indicators that allow evaluate their services, consistency and quality.     

Outsourced printing services in universities allowed to favorably resolve the problem of assignment and consumption quota by students while at the same time eliminate the acquisition of assets that it costs money to maintain them and become obsolete quickly.

Moreover, these diagram of Outsourcing allow include the services of support, management, replacement machines, supplies and staff, with a marginal cost that which is deduce from printing quotas assigned to students.

"The project results have exceeded our expectations, to the point that we have decided to extend the area of administration and teaching", concluded Luis Valenzuela. " For the first quarter of 2010 approximately 600 employees and 300 teachers can use our printing services as do our students today".