Final plans for staff printers

The final locations for on-campus printers have now been determined following the consultation period and your extensive feedback.

The high cost of maintaining the current ACU printer fleet is unsustainable with on-campus printers costing nearly $600K a year, despite usage patterns shifting and declining materially over the past five years. 

In November, we advised that we were planning to remove 60 per cent of ACU staff printers and invited feedback on the proposed plan.

185 individual pieces of feedback were received, with the majority being concerns around feasibility or convenience of completing work without a particular printer.

Every item of the extensive feedback has been carefully considered. The revised plan takes into consideration both the impact of printer removal and the need to reduce our printer fleet.

The floor plans are now available for review.

Based on the feedback, we have chosen to retain an additional 5 per cent of the existing printer fleet (19 printers) due to:

• legal, ethical, or safety reasons
• high student impact
• highly impractical environments if a printer was removed (such as crossing a busy road to access a printer)
• very specialised printing needs that cannot be solved with alternatives.

We acknowledge that the removal of some printers will cause concern and disruption. Amongst the feedback there were concerns about lost time walking to different printers, convenience of printing in a hurry, printing a high volume of items, or needing to print items repeatedly.

We have made best endeavours to address these concerns by:

• changing locations of printers
• keeping printers within a 2-minute journey for most staff
• retaining printers in high-occupancy areas
• swapping lower-quality models of printer for higher-quality models
• arranging access to areas where a printer is located behind a security door.

We will also consider other mitigating efforts such as ensuring key printers have nearby plug-and-play workstations where staff can sit if they need to do lots of printing in a short time.

Next steps

Please review the updated floor plans as there may be some additional changes to your areas, and start planning for how to incorporate these changes into your workflow area (eg. batching your printing).

Read the What is Sustainable Printing at ACU? Service Central article for further information.