CIOs are finding that getting printing under control not only saves money, it opens to the door to thinking about printing requirements more strategically.
Taking a Swipe at Print Costs
While the paperless office is as far from reality as ever, Weilerstein says many organisations are getting increasingly creative in reducing their print usage, such as through poll printing (also known as follow-me printing or card-swipe printing). Rather than having a staff member’s print jobs pushed out to a dedicated printer, they are required to walk up to the device and swipe their card before the job is processed.
“What they are really doing is authenticating themselves,” Weilerstein says. “It’s a nice opportunity to protect documents from people walking off with the wrong ones, and preventing clutter at the printer where people go digging through a pile of paper to find their work. And it’s a way to do away with jobs that get printed two or three times because people are impatient and print multiple jobs.”
It is a solution that Patey says CSC is implementing at its Melbourne office. “You are bound to find waste in printer trays if you walk around the office at the end of a typical day,” Patey says. “Follow-me secure printing not only reduces the amount of paper and toner that a company consumes, but also adds security.”
Patey estimates that the new process could eliminate up to half of the printing that takes place within the organisation today. Once deployed in Melbourne, he intends to implement the new process in other CSC offices.
For an increasing number of organisations, getting the management of printing under control opens the door to thinking about their printing requirements more strategically, but the path is not necessarily easy.
“It is relatively straightforward to show the opportunity and act on the opportunity to save money on the printing part,” Weilerstein says. “But as the value that you are delivering becomes more complex, it involves more people, touches more closely on what the organisation does, and it’s more complicated to sell it and more complicated to carry it out as well.”
This has been the case for another Upstream MPS customer, PFD Food Services. The diversified food services business operates a large fleet of trucks out of 65 locations around Australia. Having gotten printing costs under control in part by outfitting its fleet with multifunction devices, the next stage for PFD was to look at how it could use these devices more strategically.
PFD’s group IT manager Richard Cohen says one of the first problems to solve was keeping track of the paperwork relating to each delivery, which relied on drivers bringing signed delivery receipts back to their base. Barcodes were added to the invoice documents, which are scanned on the multifunction devices and reconciled against PFD’s systems.
“This solution led to every one of our branches getting a multifunction device, and they get a standalone printer as a failsafe,” Cohen says. “A branch will print their invoices, our drivers deliver their goods, leaving an invoice with the customer and bringing a sign-off version back into the office.”
Cohen says this has made life significantly easier for his staff, as they can quickly identify any discrepancies. “If you wanted to locate a particular invoice, you used to have to sift through archive boxes,” he says.
Cohen says he is also keen to make greater use of the scanning functionality of the devices. “Any time we print a document, we look at the technology and ask how else can we disseminate that,” Cohen says.
Savings Keep Trucking Along
For the diversified technology and stationery company 3M, a four-year-old MPS arrangement with Hewlett-Packard is also delivering benefits in business processes.
Computer operations manager Ross Murphy says 3M has eliminated use of three and four-part documents in its warehouse, thanks to the implementation of Adobe’s Central Pro forms software by HP and its partner Indigo Pacific.
“We don’t have to buy any pre-printed stationery, as the forms solution creates the document for us, and we are able to add a barcode on to that document,” he says. “So we are able to consolidate three or four business processes into the one document.”
Murphy says this process also incorporates the occasional requirement for the attachment of hazardous goods documentation. There has also been an improvement in the accuracy of information being recorded, as well as a saving through eliminating the need for pre-printed stationery.
“Now that is all automated, the processing in the shipping office has dramatically reduced,” Murphy says. “The trucks are able to get out quicker, because the trucks wait on this documentation being prepared.”
Another project sees 3M and HP working with the content management software company Perceptive Software to install a document management and imaging workflow system. The first project involves processing the hundreds of faxed orders that 3M receives that would have been previously imported manually into the 3M order-entry system.
The new system captures faxes coming in to 3M and converts them into TIF images that are distributed depending on the fax number they were sent to. Murphy estimates that 3M is saving $170,000 annually from that project alone, which will be replicated in other projects within the company. This includes statement processing and invoicing, where 3M will also replace pre-printed documents. Because this provides 3M with an opportunity to redesign and customise its forms, Murphy says it may be possible to reserve banner areas on the page for marketing communications messages.
Over time Murphy expects that 3M will move increasingly to electronic document processing, reducing its print requirements, and he is not alone. CSC’s Patey is also looking at additional ways to reduce its overall printing output, while Beveridge believes that IDP’s print requirements will diminish, as the universities it works with begin accepting paperless application documents.
Beveridge also points to the change coming from the increasing proportion of younger workers who have no ingrained history of printing out documents.
“There’s generational change, but it’s also about the equipment and the software,” Beveridge says. “Even the new iPads and the Kindles will start to make a difference as to whether people print something and carry it or view it online.
“But it’s the ability to be able to scribble that isn’t quite there yet — I don’t think that the people who sell highlighter pens should be worried just yet.”
Join the CIO Australia group on LinkedIn. The group is open to CIOs, IT Directors, COOs, CTOs and senior IT managers.