Arey Jones’ Five Rules When Working With Schools

By Mattie Scarpella, Arey Jones Service Manager

We’ve learned a lot over the past few decades about the special care that’s required when working with our school clients.  Campus environments are just not another ordinary place that uses computers.  Our children are inside preparing to keep civilization going in the future.That’s why it’s important we adhere to five simple fundamentals at Arey Jones:

1. Answer the phone… now!
   Nothing replaces a friendly human voice when a teacher calls in a panic to resolve a technical problem.  An office manager needs help on an invoice.  Or a school district realizes a deadline for a funding application is fast approaching and needs help on some specs.  A voicemail system won’t solve any of these situations… but a person can.
    
2. “Do not disturb” is not just a motto, it’s our passion.
   Our field teams know how to perform their tasks with minimal disruptions on campus.  We work around class schedules or during off hours.  We deliver equipment in stages so we don’t overwhelm limited storage space on a campus.  And we take campus safety seriously… our field representatives always have ID badges clearly displayed and introduce themselves to officials before proceeding.
    
3. Offer many options without dictating solutions.
   We’re fortunate to partner with the world’s best technology suppliers like Dell, HP, Intel, Lenovo, Microsoft and Promethean.  We understand that every classroom, campus and student situation is different, so we present choices to help our customers decide which option is the best for them.
    
4. Stay small enough to provide personal attention, but large enough to meet any need.
   We decided long ago to focus on the education market and not pursue other industries because we want to provide personal attention to our customers — yet offer the immense resources it takes to roll out some of the largest interactive classroom projects in the country. One way we keep this all in balance is to ensure each of our managers – from the warehouse, technical support, logistics, finance, sales and others – get to know our customers. It’s important that each Arey Jones function feels direct responsibility for our customers… it’s just natural to want to help those people you know personally.
    
5. Stay flexible and keep the end goal in mind.
   Every school or school district has its unique way of working. We try to reflect that individuality. So, sometimes we fill in as the IT staff that doesn’t exist at one location. At the next campus, we may simply provide equipment to the onsite experts who manage the integration themselves. Our only goal is to help our customers achieve their goals – however they want to accomplish them.

These are simple and commonsense rules to live by… and also easily forgotten when the chaos of daily life distracts us.  Fortunately, it only takes a quick trip to set up a classroom network or deliver a notebook computer to remind us how important these rules are in our mission to help create rich, engaging learning environments.

Extending the Life of School Technology

By Cathy Carini-Terzoli

We all know the financial challenges most schools face these days.  Yet, at the same time, the school systems we work with are united in their belief that reliable mainstream computing technology is a core requirement to prepare students for the 21st Century.

But how does one balance the funding realities with the ever-increasing technology needs?  We offer three pragmatic steps when asked to answer this question:

First, stop and look for efficiencies.

With technological innovations being introduced constantly, striving for efficiency (everything from power consumption to technical support) is a journey with no destination! Hence the reason we highly recommend making routine site reviews to unearth opportunities that allow you to do more with less.   Invariably, we always find relatively simple, low-cost ways to leverage existing technology, modify a network or actually save money by replacing an antiquated system with a newer model.   As Gartner Group’s Total Cost of Ownership studies have confirmed for decades, buying the technology is the cheap part.  How you manage and support the technology is where you save the big bucks.

Lock in support costs.

The average desktop operates effectively for five years.  A laptop averages three years.  Problems can crop up during those life spans — especially in a classroom environment where the devices are worked hard every day.   The best investment is to add an extended warranty to ensure these systems remain optimized.  Especially these days as viruses are a constant threat to any Internet-enabled computer.  Paying the standard rates to fix these devices — let alone the productivity losses through downtime — can be greatly reduced through a proactive warranty program.

Refurbish and  redeploy!

There are never enough computers in the classroom, library or computing lab at most schools.  But older technology can often serve a second life.   This is where our asset management program pays big dividends by identifying ways to extend the use of older technology when being replaced with a new unit.  A refurbished older unit often is ideal  for a less heavy-duty assignment as an Internet searching device in the library — at a cost significantly less than a new unit.  Or it may work well as an email workstation in the teacher’s lounge.  Or perhaps running a simple application for keyboarding practice in a third grade classroom… so the newer devices can be free for more computing-intense applications.

Getting another two years of life out of older computers can quickly help the budget challenges these days.  With a little creativity, you’d be surprised at how much value can be uncovered in those computers that are so 2008.