A compliant route for Craven College to access an IT Upgrade

Background:

Craven College is a further education college based in Skipton, North Yorkshire, offering a wide range of vocational qualifications to students.

The college was in need of a technology transformation as their IT equipment was on average over 7 years old. Due to the inefficiencies as a result of the age of the technology, this area needed investing in heavily. Additionally, following the pandemic, remote learning had increased and therefore a reliable technology base was essential. Every curriculum area had a heightened dependency on technology and the college saw this area as the key to success for the future.

Solution:

Craven College went through a tender process utilising Crescent Purchasing Consortium’s (CPC) framework – the National Education Digital Transformation Solutions Framework which is contract managed by Dukefield Print Solutions. The Help Desk service provided by Dukefield Print Solutions supports customers with using the framework and running a further competition. With guidance from the Help Desk, Craven College went out to tender through the framework’s lot 2 and Apogee were awarded the contract to provide an outsourced managed IT service.

A leasing solution rather than outright purchase of equipment made it more attainable for the college to upgrade their technology through the framework and stay up to date with the latest products. This included a complete desktop refresh for all student devices – resulting in over 400 desktop positions being replaced as well as laptops issued to every staff member and mobile devices.  

Benefits:

Every course will feel the long-term benefit of the new technology as it enables staff to offer a much more digital centric learning experience. Staff at the college have been overwhelmed with the quality of the technology, less queries through IT help desk including an 85% decrease in tickets. Most importantly, the college are now at 91% satisfaction rate from students on the equipment.

As the college already had a managed print service contract with Apogee, they can now link print and devices through one partner. Director of Public Sector at Apogee, Paul Rylands, explains "The digital transformation journey is only just beginning for many organisations, and we are looking forward to helping them discover a world of positive change" utilising the Crescent Purchasing Consortium framework. Paul explains that the CPC Framework can offer those "universities, colleges, schools and other areas of the public sector to optimise the technology in their workplace and enhance the way they work with documents, processes and applications".

Finally, utilising lot 2 of the framework will enable to college to continue on their digital transformation journey in an efficient and compliant way.

Customer Testimonial – Gareth Dixon, VP of Finance and Resources at Craven College: 

 "We'd worked with Apogee previously for our print contract, but we went out to tender through the framework, which we then discovered Apogee was on the framework of which we were looking to put the tender out through.

It allowed us a proven route to market for us to access what we've now got across the College, and it was something that we knew we could rely on."