Telco cuts costs and gets greener with managed print services

One of the UK's largest telecommunications companies, Cable & Wireless employs thousands of staff over several sites, including hundreds of employees it took on following its £329m takeover of rival telco Thus, formerly Scottish Telecom, in 2008.

A major consolidation of the two companies combined assets followed the merger, with chief executives predicting total savings of £82m by the end of 2012.

Some of the savings came from the loss of 600 jobs, but C&W also began looking for ways to reduce its expenditure on IT infrastructure.

Step forward HP, retained as a managed print service provider and given a new £2m three-year contract with an extended remit to audit the telco's newly expanded printing and imaging equipment spread across over 50 locations.

"We went to Gartner to do some benchmarking and convinced ourselves that what HP was offering was cost effective," said Richard Wilson, C&W Worldwide's director of IT service and operations.

"It was easier then to go with HP as a main partner, though some devices are owned by them and others by ourselves. It was about bringing together a single method of [print] management."

The first phase of that audit began in late 2009 and focused only on the telco's seven largest sites, including its Bracknell headquarters.

It discovered over 700 devices, many more than anybody expected to find, representing 56 per cent of the total printers within the company and which produced 71 per cent of its entire print volume.

Around half of those printers were retained, and the other half scrapped. The devices that were left were then consolidated into 136 HP color laserjet 5550 printers and HP4345 multifunction printers (MFPs).

These are managed using software, called SafeCom, that allows employees to send documents to their own print queue, then choose to have them printed at any device accessed by swiping their company ID card into a reader.

Documents within individual print queues not printed after eight hours are automatically deleted and all documents are set by default to print as double-sided monochrome to cut ink and page use further.

"On a like-for-like basis we have seen cost savings of around 25 per cent from a number of sources: we have cut the number of devices by more than 50 per cent, for example, and the print volume by 20 per cent," said Wilson.

"That is because of the large volumes of stuff that people print and forget about – there are stacks of paper on the out tray that they never collect – that does not happen any more."

The contract also involves HP managing the supply of consumables as well as technical support – all C&W staff have to do is procure and provide the paper and install the toner cartridges, which HP sends automatically to the site when certain thresholds have been reached.

"We have certainly see a reduced load on my [IT support] team for in-life issues, which can be as simple as making a call to the HP helpdesk," said Wilson.

"They pick up any faults or issues through remote monitoring and call us to arrange access when they arrive on site."

C&W is "very enthusiastic" about reducing its energy demands for the sake of carbon tax credits, having published a corporate mission statement aiming to reduce its carbon footprint by 80 per cent by 2050.

"We get a great deal of help from HP in driving reporting and results against green targets – we are seeing something like a 50 per cent cut in paper usage and a 32 per cent energy reduction for some devices," said Wilson.

Further savings may be realised, if only because the printing and scanning hardware audit is ongoing: "We are only just getting to the smaller sites now, places where there are only five or six people based," said Wilson.

As well as managing its printers more efficiently, C&W is also looking to cut costs and energy consumption through server virtualisation and the use of telepresence videoconferencing to replace international travel.