Kingston Hospital NHS Foundation Trust

By overcoming KHFT's Cerner direct printing issue Apogee was able to reduce the Trust’s devices from the legacy fleet by more than half, saving £500k over the contracted term.

“Our equipment is so much more reliable, and we just don’t have the problems that we’d become used to in the past.

Apogee have given us a level of support that we can be confident in. It’s great not to have to worry about printing any more.”

– Jon Beeson, Head of Procurement at Kingston Hospital NHS Foundation Trust

The Background

When Apogee was awarded the contract to provide Managed Print Services for KHFT, it was requested that we integrated Cerner printing into the new ‘Secure Print’ system. Primarily, that was to enable user productivity and print service resilience for Cerner printing. Also it would reduce reliance on Cerner with Apogee managing all print matters including the provision of new print queues.

Production Print magnifying glass over photos

The Solution

It was determined that if we could direct the Cerner print stream to the Secure Print queue then there was a ‘one too many relationship’. This would mean users could print from Cerner but release on any MFD within their fleet, negating the requirement for Cerner to build a specific queue for each printer and allowing for a larger rationalisation to the fleet. Often the challenge with integrating host systems to Windows-based print streams is that user accounts do not match i.e. the user account details in Cerner would be different to that of the same user in Windows (Active Directory).

For instance, the user ‘John Smith’ may login to Windows as ‘jsmith’ (and therefore be known by the same name within the print solution), but when he logs into Cerner the user account could be ‘john.smith’. This means that even if the print stream was directed from Cerner to Windows, the job would be considered to belong to a different account than the ‘jsmith’ Windows user.

The Trust’s staff use their Smart Cards plugged into the keyboard to access the Cerner applications. Upon investigation, we found the Smart Card number appeared within the PJL header of the print job when the user sent the job to print. We could then extract this unique reference and add it as an alias to the ‘jsmith’ account within the print management solution, thereby trying the two ‘users’ together as one. This ensured that the solution was up and running by the time the infrastructure was in place. As a further addition we wrote a custom secure Web Service to allow users to pre ‘self-register’ their Cerner card details with the print management solution.

The Outcome

KHFT had a historic fleet size of 704 devices with objectives of saving money and rationalisation of devices. By overcoming the Cerner direct printing issue we were able to reduce the Trust’s devices from the legacy fleet by more than half, with them now having 326 devices. This was accomplished through introducing 125 mono Multi-Functional Devices (MFDs) and 72 colour MFDs, removing the necessity of various single function devices.

This is a good an example of how Apogee has listened to customer’s needs, investigated potential solutions and brought through to successful completion of a bespoke and customised offering satisfying all requirements.

Benefits

Fleet size reduced by 60%
350 single-use printers removed along with their consumables
Saving of £500k over the contracted term
Maximised device uptime and performance
Print management software drives efficiencies
Enhanced service offering including an on-site engineer and dedicated contract manager