MCS ‘green’ shift saves trees, money

Efficiency boosted by online reports

I nstead of printing the hundreds of daily and biweekly reports it takes to monitor staff absences, even run payroll, Memphis City Schools is generating them online, saving the paper from the recycle bin and the money for other needs.

In three years, the paper savings alone will tally $ 50,000. (For those of you counting at home, that’s about 5,000 reams a year.) It will also save labor, wear and tear on printing equipment and hard- to- quantify lostopportunity costs for administrators waiting on reports to make decisions.

“Our customers love it,” said Glen Downing, t he soft- spoken MCS senior systems administrator who in several months has converted 40 print f iles for online distribution. “They don’t have to come in and pick up reports. When they come in to work, the reports are there.”

The idea, he said, came from a customer. Downing took a fresh look at software he had rejected a few years ago and went to work.

The savings are the f irst in a data pile both city and county school districts are looking at this year as they scan the nation for best practices and prepare to build a unified school district from scratch.

What efficiencies can be gleaned from IT, the nerve center of any organization, are among the most critical.

According to research by Boston Consulting Group (which helped the Transition Planning Commission compile its recommendations for merging the districts,) MCS and Shelby County Schools outspend most urban districts in IT services, which can indicate inefficiency. The median spent is $141 per student, according to the Council of the Great City Schools. MCS spends $235 per student or $25 million; SCS spends $260 per student or $ 12.2 million a year.

Besides compiling vendor contracts, (MCS, for instance, buys hardware from 500 vendors), the TPC recommends t he districts streamline their “help desks.” Together the districts have 92 fulltime employees assigned to fix computer problems in schools and offices.

By Christmas, MCS will be able to see an individual computer in any of its 190 schools and repair software issues from a central off ice, which means it can use its service technicians somewhere else. It will also be able to program its thousands of PCs to shut down at night, saving taxpayers $ 480,000plus a year in utility costs and covering the cost of the software in just over two years.

“Life cycle management gives us full management of t he asset from procurement to dis- posal,” said Rich Valerga, MCS chief information off icer. “With t he remote support tool, we get to a problem faster. We can also see if a piece of equipment goes down,” he said.

The software will also help school off icia l s monitor licensing fees. “If we buy 10,000 licenses from Microsoft, we will be able to see how many times they have been installed. If it’s only 8,000 times, we can drop 2,000 subscriptions,” he said.

So far, the largest savings, based on energy trials, are utility costs.

Under the TPC plan, combined districts’ are expected to cut utility costs 10 to 15 percent.

“The plan i ncludes f i nancial i ncentives to schools that adhere to the policy and penalties to Memphis City School’s systems operator Lachrisha Jackson loads paper into a printer in the Data Center at the school system’s administrative office on Avery. Officials hope a shift from paper to digital will cut costs including paper and utilities. schools that don’t,” said Nithya Vaduganathan with Boston Consulti ng Group i n Chicago. “We didn’t go into detail about specific actions the districts could take, but this idea definitely falls under that.”

SCS is monitoring the utility- saving program from its side of the house.

“Our district is moving toward the adoption of a like process by next school year — possibly later this year,” said SCS spokesman Shawn Pachucki.

For as much as MCS staff like the online reports, they likely would not be happening if employees hadn’t been asked for ways to i mprove the department’s work, Valerga said.

“We’ve asked every employee to come up with ideas. It’s working.”