Partner Article

Controlling printing and cutting costs

Case study: How OKI helped Homes for Northumberland control its printing and cut costs.

Homes for Northumberland is responsible for the management of over 8,500 homes on behalf of Northumberland County Council. The company previously deployed approximately 50 devices from a broad range of different vendors. These were scattered across its Blyth headquarters, Alnwick site and Blyth stores depot to support its intensive requirement for general office and administrative printing.

Many of these printers were aging and in need of repair. Without a maintenance contract in place, the company found that the process of carrying out general repairs to the printers was consuming too much in-house IT resource and the team realised that, if not addressed, the problem would grow over time.

The sheer number of printers and the fact that they came from multiple vendors meant that managing stocks of consumables was an expensive and unwieldy process.

Homes for Northumberland decided to look for a single supplier, capable of taking over all responsibility for supply, service and consumables for copy, print, fax and scanning requirements within the company at a fixed cost per print.

Aware of the benefits of the approach, Homes for Northumberland began to look at the possibility of investing in a managed print services (MPS) solution. The company began speaking to printing solutions vendor, OKI, following a recommendation from its IT reseller partner, DP Supplies.

Making a Proposition

Following an analysis of volumes printed by Homes for Northumberland’s existing printing solutions fleet, OKI proposed an MPS solution, designed to improve printing efficiency and productivity. OKI calculated that this would involve a 42 per cent reduction in devices, while providing more multi-function printers (MFPs) to facilitate the growing need for scanning of documents folders and email.

Homes for Northumberland was so pleased with the OKI MPS proposal that it decided to refresh all the devices at its Blyth headquarters, Alnwick office and Blyth stores depot. It now has a broad range of OKI devices installed, including ES5461 MFPs incorporating copy, print and fax functionality, ES8460 MFPs and smaller models including ES4140s and ES7411s and an ES8430 A3 device for the procurement department.

Ian Macdonald, ICT Officer at Homes for Northumberland, said, “We did consider other printing solutions vendors. We chose OKI because they listened to what we said we wanted and tailored their solution to our requirements rather than trying to impose an inflexible plan on us.”

The delivery and implementation of the new printers was carried out by DP Supplies. The process went smoothly with few issues reported. Most users were ‘up to speed’ on the new devices within two days, but OKI did provide training for key users.

Scoping the Benefits

Homes for Northumberland has reported a broad range of benefits from the OKI MPS implementation. It now pays for its printing resource on a cost per page basis, with OKI supplying an invoice on a quarterly basis. This approach incorporates toner supply and repair and maintenance to the printers. This saves the housing company money and makes budgeting more predictable. It also acts as an ‘inflation buster’, with the cost per page kept constant for a five year period.

The MPS approach frees up the time of Homes for Northumberland’s IT services and support team, which no longer needs to carry out printer maintenance. Typically, it also means less printer downtime as an engineer can be out on site the next day if there are any problems. In addition, OKI provides a customer help desk for issues that can be resolved over the phone.

By standardising on OKI printers and reducing the overall size of the fleet from around 55 devices, including printers, copiers and fax machines, down to 29, Homes for Northumberland has been able to significantly reduce the volume of expensive toner stock it has to keep. Now it simply phones OKI for new consumables whenever it needs them.

Homes for Northumberland also gains major benefits from the functionality of the printers themselves. The new OKI printers are highly energy efficient which helps keep running costs low. Also, the new MFPs have given Homes for Northumberland new capabilities that it did not have previously. It can scan a document to email, for example, or it can send an incoming fax to a PC or a network folder, eliminating the need to print. Adding further flexibility, A3 capability is now available to all staff, which was not previously the case.

Users also benefit from access to high-quality print management software. Automatic alerts are sent to the email inboxes of the Homes for Northumberland IT management team to give them a warning of when a toner is about to run out.

The new approach also helps save Homes for Northumberland money by cutting the volume of expensive colour printing carried out. Although colour capability is available to all staff, printers are set to mono as standard. This simple measure is making a huge difference to Homes for Northumberland by significantly reducing the amount of accidental colour printing which takes place across its offices. In addition, setting the printers to output in duplex as standard also helps reduce wastage and associated costs.

User feedback on the printers has been extremely positive with comments that overall print speeds have accelerated since the new printers were installed. Users also feel that Homes for Northumberland has gained by having more trays on many of the printers than were previously available. They can, for example, load letterhead in one tray and standard paper in another. This allows them to accomplish with one printer what might have previously taken two to carry out.

Homes for Northumberland employees have also been delighted by the ability to print securely, a particularly valuable capability for PAs, human resources staff and senior management, who often have to deal with confidential information.

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This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Tom Keighley .