Here’s a common pre-Managed Print Services scenario based on a real-life situation. Grant Thornton, a professional services firm specializing in auditing and consulting has 1,600 staff in 22 different offices. Like many organizations, the firm didn’t pay much attention to its print volume or number of MFPs at first. But being in the financial business, they decided to run an audit on themselves and found that one office alone had about 130 printers, 13 multifunction printers and 13 fax machines, spanning eight brands and 64 models — all for 290 employees.
It was clear that their unmanaged printing environment was causing problems. First, there was a financial issue, as they were unable to determine printing costs and therefore couldn’t budget them from year to year.
There was also a support issue. Each office maintained their own print fleet, so there were no common print policies or economies. All those devices and their users generated lots of incidents, too, which took time to resolve. For each new version of software or hardware, they had to re-enable a number of devices, a time-consuming experience.
Getting to a Better Place
To get to a better place, this organization decided to adopt centralized and standardized policies to reduce support costs. They wanted a small IT department that could run hardware and software in a centralized way, but managing the output devices wasn’t to be part of that focus. This was an ideal scenario for a Managed Print Services (MPS) engagement, and Xerox channel partner, Document Store, was chosen for the task.
Now, proactive management has reduced support demands, as copiers and printers can automatically reorder toner and request technical support. An authentication system provides the print fleet with greater document security.
Grant Thornton tackled its resource imbalance by redistributing printers, and they can monitor the fleet’s performance. Document Store assigned a dedicated person available every day to help with print fleet issues. The company now has a long-term relationship with their MPS vendor, who knows their business inside and out. Grant Thornton’s IT leader takes part in quarterly review meetings to adjust key goals and to deal with any minor issues.
See the Video Version
Watch this subtitled video to hear the company’s IT manager share other ways MPS brought more value to this business. A shout out to Xerox channel partner, Document Store, for driving this success.
