PIETA
Overview
Pieta first opened its doors in Lucan, County Dublin in 2006. Since then, they have seen and helped over 70,000 people in suicidal distress or engaging in self-harm.
They now operate 20 locations across Ireland. Pieta employs over 300 therapists and support staff, and the demand for their service is increasing.
In 2022 Pieta delivered over 50,000 hours of intervention and bereavement counselling. They received almost 100,000 crisis support calls and texts through their 24 freephone helplines and they directly supported over 700 households devastated by the loss of a loved one by suicide.
The customer needs and challenges
The initial requirement from Pieta was to
- Provide a hardware and cloud based managed printing solution that would integrate with their Azure AD.
- Ensure a seamless deployment of cloud- based queues to all users.
- Agree & develop a rule-based printing system to control the use of colour and mono printing.
- Automatic replenishment of their toners which would be triggered at a set level.
- Provide secure printing which would involve each user having to authenticate at the printer before retrieving their print jobs or completing any actions on the printer i.e. scanning and copying.
How did we engage with the customer?
We engaged the technical team who gathered information from all the stakeholders to ensure we understood all the printing requirements at each location. With all the relevant information and requirements mapped out we set out to design a solution that would deliver a quick a seamless rollout while addressing all the needs of Pieta.
“Our organization is spread out across the country, as with my networking equipment. I was looking for a cloud based solution that would give me visibility and control over the devices while providing flexibility, convenience and above all secure printing for my users whilst reducing waste.
Of the numerous vendors I looked at, MacroEV was able to bring my requirements to fruition and at a very competitive rate. Through their partner, Toshiba, I deployed a cloud managed solution and have full visibility of the estate plus a customizable reporting tool to keep finance informed on usage at each location.”
Damian Menendez I.T. ManagerWhat were the main challenges the customer was facing?
The customer had a large fleet of printers which were not being fully utilised. The print queues were installed locally on each user’s pc which involved a member of the I.T team having to install these for each user. The user could change the print queues installed to print in colour at any point. Prints were being done without any accountability on what was being printed and by whom. They also had issues with their toner monitoring service going offline as this was being installed on laptops and once the laptop was taken off site the alerts were being missed and therefore printing would not be available at these locations. The printers were also not locked down and as a result could be used by anybody.
How did we solve their challenges?
Once we had established the needs and challenges of the customer, we set about designing a solution to address them. This involved a cloud based “follow me” print solution with two rule-based print queues being set up, one Mono and one Colour. These print queues were pushed out to each user automatically through Microsoft Intune. Our solution sync’s directly with Azure AD and automatically generated a pin number for each user while subsequently emailing each user with those pins. As a result, users can now print to either of the print queues and retrieve their print job from any printer within the fleet whether or not their laptop is on the same network as the printer.
Users simply enter their pin number at the printer’s screen and a list of the jobs the users submitted will be available for the user to select and print. If the jobs are not collected after a set amount of time they will be deleted. The software will determine the user’s permission levels and if colour is not allowed it will convert the job to mono automatically.
MacroEV also provided an automated report from the software to email to the finance team, so they had visibility of printing levels across all locations. All of this can be centrally managed from a web-based portal accessible by Pieta.
To enable reliable monitoring of the printers, MacroEV installed mini-PC’s in each location, that are configured to monitor consumable or service alerts on the printers. This removes the need to install any software on Pieta’s Laptops therefore providing us with reliable printer communication.
By using a cloud based follow me print solution we were able to significantly reduce Pieta’s printing fleet and remove the manual process of installing printer drivers along with the issue of un-retrieved print jobs sitting printed next to the printer.
