Lancashire Care NHS Foundation Trust saves £200k with Canon Managed Print Services

Canon had best understanding of what the trust wanted to achieve, says director of finance Dave Tomlinson

Lancashire Care NHS Foundation Trust (LCFT) has reduced its printing costs by 30 per cent, saving £200k in the process, since it implemented Canon's Managed Print Services (MPS).

The trust selected Canon after a tender process in 2010, as the organisation reviewed its printing costs as part of its agile working policy.

"The managed print process was really important because it enables everyone to work anywhere and to print stuff wherever they'd like. It is about flexibility and improving the way we work, as well as saving money," Dave Tomlinson, director of finance at the trust told Computing.

LCFT selected Canon as its MPS provider in 2010 after going through a procurement process as part of its agile working policy. Although Tomlinson declined to comment on which other providers were looked at, he said that Canon stood out because the trust believed it would get the support it needed after the deal was made.

"They had the best understanding of what we wanted to do, and understood the whole cost of the entire process which was important for us," he said.

"If you've got a piece of kit which could leave a whole load of people screwed if it fails, then the responsiveness and fault fixing, and ability to get the right equipment which is heavy duty and stands up to wear and tear is really important," he added.

The implementation has been staggered as part of a three-year programme, across 130 of the trust's sites. Tomlinson explained that this was so the staff could make the best use of technology and not create more issues than those that are being solved.

"It was important we did this the right way with experts on the individual sites, putting all of the effort into training. So we had a lengthy phasing approach but you could tell there were significant improvements from early on," he said.

The main challenge for the trust was the cultural changes for the people.

"Inherently people see a change like this as a loss of control. They used to have their own printers, and now they've got to use the local printer, and they can't print colour when they want," he said. "If a printer or multi-faceted device goes down, automatically people respond with ‘oh look at that'. You have to get behind it; the pros and benefits do outweigh the cons."

One of the key ways that the organisation is saving £200k in costs is to make it a standard option to print in black and white, and print on both sides of the paper. This will also help to reduce its paper consumption by 40 per cent, and decrease its colour output by 15 per cent.

The key benefit to Tomlinson is the ability to print from anywhere at anytime.

"It means that I can go to my nearest printer, log in and pull off all the prints I want there and then. So I could be working at home and do all of my work there, and then come in to the office and do a load of park printing," he said. "Clearly you have to manage this appropriately as there might already be a lot of documents printing from someone else but it means you've got better flexibility, far better controls of the consumables, and you can set the standards."

LCFT is planning to enter the third phase of the MPS implementation and is due to complete the rollout to the trust's final 25 sites this month.