University of Salford

The University of Salford is located near to the city of Manchester, and boasts a 20,000 strong student population. The campus is part of a £650m regeneration scheme to transform the campus environment, delivering an excellent and modern teaching and learning environment.

In 2012, the university library decided that they needed a unique selling point to draw in potential students, and also to continue the brilliant services they were providing to their existing ones. At the time, the university library was using the Diplomat™ Camlock to store and charge their laptops. Whilst it was the right solution for the university library initially, staff began to realise this current system of loaning out laptops manually from their laptop lockers had become ineffective. This is when the university library made the decision to upgrade to the self-service Diplomat™ Nedap LoXS®.

As Customer Support Manager at University of Salford Library, Dominic Marsh said: It was taking up a lot of valuable staff time to check in and check out the laptops. We also realised that students always had to queue to borrow the laptops, sometimes for quite a while. This is when the university library decided they would need to move to a self-service solution to optimise staff time and minimise the amount of time students had to queue.

Dominic continued: We wanted to offer our students more flexibility by offering laptop loans so they were able to work in a quiet part of the university alone, rather than always have to work in a large, busy classroom with fixed computers. We felt that this would enable the student’s quality of work to improve. The university library already had the LapSafe® Diplomat™ Camlock when I joined the team, but as the lockers were very popular the demand for laptop loans from the students grew. We realised this wasn’t a good use of staff time and resources. After speaking with LapSafe® about our new requirements we found that it was a more simple and cost-effective solution to simply upgrade our Diplomat™ Camlock units to the intelligent self-service Diplomat™ Nedap LoXS®.

Today, the University of Salford has around 240 laptops spread over three different sites, with four main Diplomat™ Nedap LoXS® terminals.

The fact that the university library had purchased from LapSafe® in the past made the decision to upgrade easy. As Dominic states: I have a very good relationship with my accounts managers at LapSafe® and have never had any issues. The upgrade to the Nedap LoXS® self-service delivery was brilliant and I was very pleased; I would definitely recommend LapSafe® to other universities.

Dominic concluded: Purchasing laptops and the Diplomat™ Nedap LoXS® lockers from LapSafe® has changed the way the students work. They now have much more freedom to work when they want and need to, and having the self-service aspect means that staff time is used more effectively. Hundreds of students across the University of Salford sites use the lockers and there is no longer any time spent queuing for laptop loans. The students really like the lockers, and the flexibility of borrowing a laptop when they need one, with no need to queue. Some lunchtimes there are no laptops left, and on one of our sites students can access the laptops 24 hours a day using the Diplomat&trace; Nedap LoXS®