All-in-one MFP devices can save money and boost productivity – if done right

The City of Langford in BC has saved money and boosted its productivity by consolidating devices on multi-functional peripherals (MFPs) – but, as in any organization, the roll-out took some thought to make sure it was done right. “We had a lot of stand-alone copiers,” says Mike Palmer, Langford’s manager of information technology, in conversation with Telemanagement. “I’d look around and see different machines – fax machines, printers, scanners – so when MFPs came out we saw the opportunity to combine and consolidate.” Located on Vancouver Island, Langford is the third largest city in the provincial capital region. Situated about 15 kilometres west of Victoria, the city prides itself in being on the cutting edge of technology awareness and deployment. “We are small and we are agile,” says Palmer. “Langford is a lot further ahead than municipalities of the same size in our area. We are always trying to find better and more cost-effective ways to deliver service.” The municipality has consolidated its peripheral infrastructure on technology from Hewlett-Packard (HP), which recently came out with an expanded portfolio of network-friendly offerings. But as vendors like HP sell the idea of integrated workflow, many organizations are still living in the past. “It speaks to the product quality of earlier devices – there are still printers out there from when DOS was new,” says Jean-Paul Desmarais, HP’s Toronto-based enterprise marketing manager. “But these old devices can be a waste from an energy perspective. New devices operate at a higher speed; they are more efficient and cost less.” Many vendors offer trade-in programs to make it easier for organizations. However, there are a lot of devices to choose from, and it is important to realize that MFPs are not a one-size-fits-all solution. For example, there may be a role for single function printers. Here is where it may be important to keep the vendor at arm’s length and deal with a trusted channel partner. “Island Key Computers helped us size the machines accordingly to make sure we got the best machine for the job,” says Palmer. Island Key – which also sells MFPs from Samsung and Lexmark – could help Palmer at the City of Langford drill down to very specific usages. The municipality, which only has 70 employees at its central City Hall site, managed to roll-out devices to very specific requirements. “As we sourced our printers and MFPs we chose to place them strategically,” says Palmer. Various departments – from building and engineering, to administration/planning and parks – have different MFP models to address specific needs, and volume is high. “We do high-volume scanning every day,” says Palmer. “Over the past five years we have scanned two to three hundred thousand documents as PDF and TIF images. We use SharePoint portal server for document management – we can index and do keyword searches for everything we scan.” MFPs can help out in distributed environments As director of network and communications services at McGill University, Gary Bernstein is not the guy to call if you have trouble with your printer. But his own experience shed light on the need to consolidate with MFPs – a shift he believes can bring quick cost savings and productivity improvements, if done right. “I saw the way we operated and I realized I had to bring changes,” says Bernstein, who is also on the Advisory Board of Telemanagement. In his own office Bernstein regularly encountered what is a familiar sight to many of us: a printing room littered with paper, toner, and other supplies, with documents sitting in public view. He intuitively knew that using MFPs made sense. “If you look closely at the costs – not soft costs but just the costs associated per user – you can see that they are higher if you don’t have a model where people share devices.” Bernstein’s overall responsibilities include running a large staff to attend to the IT needs of some 50,000 users – students, professors and administrators. This involves managing nearly 5,000 devices scattered in various offices, devices that perform specific tasks in often idiosyncratic settings. “It can be a bit of nightmare from an efficiency perspective,” says Bernstein. “A university is, in many ways, a collective of independent enterprises. Each department has its own central administration, and within each department there are offices with a wide variety of devices.” At McGill, the efficient centralization of resources is an objective, but still very much a work in process. To get it right in such a large organization there are two key pieces of research required: get a person-by-person understanding of usage requirements, and deploy a fleet management strategy so that you can track what’s going on to adapt to changes and make the system run as efficiently as possible. The productivity benefits are real – as are the pitfalls “The most productive environment for knowledge workers is a mix of printers and MFPs,” says Desmarais. “This way you can minimize the time people take to travel to the lowest cost solution. You want to avoid focusing on the hard cost of the solution – you want the right devices as close as possible to the workers who are going to use them.” The reasons are straightforward enough: it can be an expensive proposition, and unproductive, for knowledge workers to be spending their time walking back and forth from devices. “An optimal environment has a combination of black-and-white and colour,” says Desmarais. “We have tools to manage who has access to colour, and also what application can print in colour: for example, we can set it so that in Outlook users can only print in black-and-white.” Although an MFP strategy might make intuitive sense, at the City of Langford the numbers speak for themselves. Employees can access documents with a click of a mouse, saving time and – according to the city – approximately $100,000 in capital costs by not storing as many paper documents in the office. And there are savings on real estate, too. “We did some analysis on how much scanning we've done and how much floor space we've saved,” says Palmer. “Previously we had saved 450 square feet at $200 per square foot, totaling $90,000. But in the last four years we've increased that by 800 square feet.” Result? With current office space costs at $250 per square feet, to find 800 additional square feet of office space would cost $200,000. “I can confidently say we've saved $290,000 over the years in office space alone with our MFP solution,” says Palmer. He adds that Langford’s City Hall is at capacity for office space, and that an additional 1,250 square feet of work space is being used for staff and not files, potentially saving the city $312,500 in today's dollars. But such good news stories are not always the norm. Although the University of Calgary’s seven-year, $40-million, deal with Xerox Canada has received some good press, it’s also getting mixed reviews by end users. Biggest problem: overkill. In some places Xerox MFPs replaced perfectly functional printers, and paper usage remains high. According to one anonymous complainant, what was formerly a simple process of pressing print has become a “baffling ordeal” of PIN numbers and ID codes, and some office are actually buying extra printers to avoid the hassle. Software can make all the difference When an organization considers consolidating on MFPs it often then has an opportunity – and a challenge – when it comes to making the most of document management and archiving capabilities. There has been a slew of recent announcements from Epson Corp, Konica Minolta Holdings Inc, HP, and Datacap Inc regarding software support for MFPs. One of the most interesting of these is Datacap’s introduction of its FastDoc Capture software. “We eliminate manual data entry,” says David Jenness, marketing manager for Tarrytown, NY-headquartered Datacap. “Many organizations with scanning capabilities still have all these data entry people typing in indexes in order for people to search meta-data.” Specifically, Datacap’s FastDoc Capture is a lower price-point solution that combines indexing automation with recognition. “Datacap lives in the advanced forms processing industry,” says Jenness. “This includes invoice processing, which is complicated stuff, as data can be all over the place. But our software is very flexible – you can apply different rules to different documents. That means you can have rules for Canadian postal codes and taxes, if you want.” Datacap also provides a fingerprint technology that maps out documents and remembers them. “An invoice from Dell will always look like an invoice from Dell,” says Jenness. “We have one customer with 55,000 different fingerprints. A résumé looks like a résumé, and a health record looks like a health record – if we have seen it before, we know it.” What this means to the deployment of MFPs is that in large organizations with properly networked devices employees can move about and scan from different locations. They can also use different workstations – even with remote access – and have fully searchable access to properly archived documents. A product like FastDoc Capture, for example, works with all MFPs. “You might have to process the first one manually,” says Jenness. “But it’s easy; you can click on a document and activate a field, and the next time you see the document the software will know where it is. This is about productivity – it’s about cutting down on manual data entry.” And then there was green We all know that the paperless office has been more myth than reality, but there is evidence that MFPs can be a bit easier on the environment. First, scanning can cut down on paper duplication and encourage digital archiving; second, fleet management technologies can help enterprises keep a close eye on energy, paper, and toner/ink consumption. “You can reduce paper usage by 25% just by setting the default on a printer to duplex,” says Jean-Paul Desmarais, enterprise marketing manager for HP, in reference to the two-sided print option. HP’s Web Jetadmin EE, a fee-based offering, offers technical support, maintenance and services to help maintain enterprise device management environments. The vendor also has an Application Integration Module that provides web services interfaces to Web Jetadmin – allowing IT applications to retrieve device lists, device status information and fleet notification – as well as a Business Intelligence Module that offers business intelligence reporting for imaging and printing device management. “This is a more detailed set of reporting on the usage of devices,” says Desmarais, referring to the Business Intelligence Module. “It can be applied into other enterprise systems – the same applications that are being used to run devices on the network can now be used to look at MFPs. They can report into enterprise reporting management systems.” There is a cultural shift happening where many IT leaders in large organizations feel they also have a responsibility to the environment. For example, Gary Bernstein, director of network and communications services at McGill University, also chairs the university’s Green Computing Committee. “I am sensitive to the environmental issues in play,” says Bernstein, in reference to the waste that exists in McGill’s campus with its complex distribution of printers, faxes, and scanners. “I feel compelled take initiative, first within my own office and eventually throughout the entire campus.”

All-in-one MFP devices can save money and boost productivity – if done right

News | April 21, 2009

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