Cheshire County Council is one of the largest employers in the North West, employing 25,000 people across multi-sites in the county. The ongoing challenge for their ICT department is to run and maintain around 7000 PCs and 1000 printers across many sites in a cost effective manner. Reliability, purchase price, overall cost of ownership and performance were key requirements for their IT equipment, along with networking capabilities and ease of maintenance.
Cheshire County Council has used Brother equipment for many years because of their cost, reliability and ease of maintenance. All Councils have to ensure they are receiving ‘best value’ from their suppliers and equipment. Subsequently a selection of manufacturers were asked to supply equipment for a series of internal tests. They ran the same amount of documents through various different printers and measured outputs such as the time taken to set up equipment, print the document, volume of consumables used, quality of print and an overall perspective was taken to ascertain the ongoing running costs.
Brother came out very well in these tests, confirming ‘value for money’.

Cheshire County Council now have over 1000 Brother faxes, mono and colour laser printers in their portfolio. Several hundred network-ready HL-2700CN colour laser printers, the network-ready HL-5250DN mono laser printers and the compact
HL-2040 mono laser printers make up the majority of these.
The printers that support the network feature, need to be easily monitored to help reduce IT support time. Brother’s network models are supplied with solution software, BR-Admin, as standard.

Cheshire County Council had come to rely on Brother’s reliability and good value for money. The internal tests undertaken proved that Brother machines also ranked highly in performance and quality of output. Steve Hopson, Head of ICT at Cheshire County Council said, “We found Brother very helpful, taking an interest in the particular ways we wanted to use their equipment and helping us to select the right equipment for the job.”
By standardising their product base Cheshire County Council has increased staff efficiency in the use and support of their IT equipment.
The networking function ensures that the printers can be accessed by numerous users in a work group. The BR-Admin software, supplied as standard with the
HL-2700CN and HL-5250DN models, has also helped to reduce IT support time, whereby common printer issues, such as paper jams and low toner, can be monitored and resolved without IT staff leaving their desks.
Steve Hopson, Head of ICT at Cheshire County Council said, “The main reason we like Brother equipment is it offers value for money and that whenever there are difficulties in what we were trying to do, Brother show genuine interest and are
pro-active in trying to resolve them.
As an Authority, we choose to use Brother because they are prepared to go the
extra mile.”