Guide to managed print services pt3 - case studies

Rationalising the volume and type of equipment can yield significant savings

It took a critical report by the National Audit Office (NAO) to prompt the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) to take a long hard look at how it could optimise its poorly managed document supply chain, including print services.

The NAO judged that a lack of centralised control, a proliferation of suppliers and document types, a lack of visibility into stock or spend, and slow processes prone to error had led to unnecessarily high costs.

In a bid to clean up its act, the DWP signed a seven-year, £400m deal with Xerox to manage a transformation programme dubbed Sustainable Print Service (SPS).

As well as exploring document digitisation and automation technologies, the initiative involved a sweeping print consolidation project covering 1,027 sites, including DWP offices, Citizens Advice Bureau offices, doctors’ surgeries, libraries and local government offices, conducted between March 2010 and May 2011.

This consolidation saw the removal of 25,415 network printers, 6,639 fax machines and 3,622 copiers, to be replaced by 5,383 Xerox MFDs and 2,839 printers.

“Before the SPS, the department had a mixed environment of aging printers that were prone to failure and often interfered with staff’s ability to conduct business,” says DWP head of commercial management Frank Tudor. “The ordering of consumables is automated, ensuring that no device runs out. And engineering visits have reduced by 78 per cent.”

The contract’s service-level agreement (SLA) provides 99.9 per cent printer availability and an eight-hour fix on fail. The DWP estimates it is on target to shave 20 per cent off its desk-side printing costs, though it would not reveal the figure itself.

This was supplemented by a 63 per cent reduction in electricity consumption, and a 25 per cent cut in the volume of paper it uses by making duplex printing a standard option. In addition, the percentage of documents now printed in colour has fallen from 2.3 per cent to 0.38 per cent of the total.

Rationalising for savings

Rationalising the volume and type of equipment has also yielded significant savings in consumables, with fewer supplies needed to be procured or stored.

Given the scale of the project and the number of people involved, the DWP was keen to make sure its staff were up to speed with its focus on sustainability, and that they had received sufficient training to help them get the most out of the equipment.

“We always knew that moving from a printer ratio of 2.7 staff per device to an average of 12 staff per device would present cultural change issues,” says Tudor. “So we backed up the Sustainable Print Service with a communications programme, including dedicated intranet microsite, posters and site briefings. All users were given a 15-minute overview on how to use the new multifunction devices, with more detailed training for super-users.”

User education also played a big part in the print consolidation project at Cotswold District Council, although on a much smaller scale. In 2009, it contracted Canon to lease 11 MFDs to replace the 50 monochrome desktop printers, 14 colour desktop printers and 15 photocopiers at its headquarters in Oxfordshire.

“We have green champions in each department and put in a document management system so we do not have to shuffle paper around the organisation,” says Mike Brown, Cotswold District Council ICT services manager.

“We also try to identify peaks then send in people to see if the process can be improved and make sure they are doing it in the most effective manner.”

The as-and-when approach

Cotswold decided against opting for a fully managed print service involving a single supplier taking responsibility for the running and maintenance of every device on its premises. The council uses Canon only for the supply and maintenance of the MFDs, with a separate, external contract for other ICT services, including helpdesk, with Steria.

“We decided we wanted to control everything ourselves and could not see the point of that [a fully managed print service]. We get a good service from Canon for repair and maintenance, and did not see the value of outsourcing it. We wanted to retain the flexibility and keep our options open for further expansion,” says Brown. “People report any problems with Canon [equipment] directly to our helpdesk. We analyse it, then decide whether to push it on to Canon or Steria.”

The agreement with Canon involves fixed lease costs for MFDs, with additional pre-agreed ‘click-to-print’ charges totted up every three months. This charge is standard across all documents and only differs between mono or colour to reflect the higher price of colour consumables. Full duplex is enabled by default and higher charges apply to single-page printing.

The click price is guaranteed up to about five million printed pages, though Cotswold District Council comes nowhere near that. It doesn’t own the printers; instead, it leases them for the duration of the contract and has the option of replacing them.

“We know where we are with the fixed lease costs, then the agreed click charges,” says Brown. “Now that we no longer have 60-70 printers on site, we can also negotiate the service contract price with Steria.”

A big sell for Brown was Canon’s UniFlow software, which networks the printers, records usage statistics and produces monthly reports that allow the council to analyse ongoing costs. Users can also print to a single print queue, then pick up the print job from any of the devices by logging into the printer using their security pass.

“It’s a fully automated print management system that accesses the machines and downloads the print data from them every three months,” says Brown, who estimates the consolidation has brought Cotswold’s print costs down from £20,000 to £2,500 per year. “The only reason we are spending that is because we print things like payslips, cheques, taxi licences and other documents on more specialist printers in house.”

Cost reduction

A three-year leased MPS contract with OKI also resulted in a 30 per cent reduction in print cost for the Hastings Hotels Group, which currently prints about 1.5 million pages per year. Working in conjunction with Belfast-based IT solutions provider EOS Systems, the project involved a full audit of the company’s printers and hardcopy output, followed by a financial audit to establish costs, obtained by engineers visiting each of the company’s six hotels and head office.

The up-to-date OKI printers are provided free as part of the contract, with EOS offering local helpdesk facilities and OKI implementing fixed quarterly charges for its duration, according to Hastings Hotels Group revenue manager Pamela Shaw. The company still outsources some print jobs – leaflets, menus, promotional materials.

Remote monitoring software keeps track of consumables and sends replenishments where ink or toner is low, which reduces device downtime, says Shaw, who is as yet unable to estimate any savings in electricity consumption.