Case Study with Mark Griffioen of Queensland’s Scenic Rim Regional Council

The challenge

Set in the foothills of the Great Dividing Range, Scenic Rim Regional Council has approximately 35,000 residents spread over 4250sq km. In 2008, the Queensland government reduced the number of councils from 156 to just 72 and formed the Scenic Rim Regional Council, amalgamating Boonah Shire, most of Beaudesert Shire and the Mutdapilly/Harrisville/Peak Crossing area of Ipswich City.

With any amalgamation or merger, organizations go through a huge amount of IT integration, from system integration through infrastructure and hardware. SRRC was no exception. Following the merger, SRRC’s print fleet totalled more than 80 print devices, including 61 printers and 17 photocopiers from six different vendors.

“The amalgamation of councils left us with a large number of printers and photocopiers to manage, as well as multiple vendors to deal with. Managing lease agreements, servicing and consumables took up a significant amount of staff time and proved costly,” said the Regional Council’s Corporate and Community Services Director Mark Griffioen.

With a variety of vendors and devices to manage, there was no central management system for the print environment. “We had numerous people managing different machines across each council department, making it difficult to monitor and track the amount of paper and consumables being used across the council and almost impossible to consolidate and streamline costs.”

The solution

SRRC looked at implementing a rationalization project to improve the situation and cut costs by asking vendors to tender for the business.

“After reviewing the cost of our print environment, we asked four vendors to tender for the business. Our objectives were not only to reduce costs, but also to create a sustainable print environment across the council.”

Canon recommended SRRC consolidate, centralize and secure its print environment, while allowing staff to easily monitor and control how they printed.

“Canon provided the best solution for us. With uniFLOW as the backbone to the implementation and the foresight to reduce our print devices from 80 to just 32 multifunction devices, Canon’s offering was the most compelling.”

With cost reduction as one of SRRC’s main objectives, Canon started by consolidating the number of devices. With six vendors and numerous models scattered throughout the council, Canon examined how staff utilized the devices and the functions required to ensure the consolidation would have a positive effect on staff productivity and machine efficiency.

Canon introduced its uniFLOW software to help increase productivity whilst reducing both cost and waste. One of the solution’s key features is the secure print-release function, requiring all SRRC employees to swipe an identity card at the device before their print job is released. Any print jobs not released within 24 hours are automatically deleted, eliminating long print queues and reducing paper wastage.

“Previously, staff would always print to the same device, so if someone had sent a large document to the same device earlier, then they would have to wait for the document to finish before their own document would appear. Now with uniFLOW if staff get to the printer and it is busy, they simply walk to the next device, swipe their identity card and receive their printing without having to wait,” said Griffioen.

By implementing uniFLOW follow-me print, employees now swipe their existing security ID card at the printer before a print job can be released. By installing card readers on all multifunction devices, Canon was able to provide a secure and sustainable solution for SRRC.

“Secure printing provided us with the confidence we needed to move employees who print confidential information to group printers, as jobs are only released when the authorized person is present.”

With its previous print fleet including more black-and-white multifunction devices than color, SRRC needed to ensure that its costs wouldn’t increase by moving to an all color print fleet. Thanks to uniFLOW, SRRC is able to default all print jobs to black-and-white, no matter what printer was selected.

“Initially staff were worried that the reduced number of printers and multifunction devices would mean large queues at the printer. However, by implementing uniFLOW, we were able to alleviate employee concerns and actually reduce the time they spent waiting for print outs,” said Griffioen.

To help manage the changes taking place in the printing environment at SRRC, Canon provided a resource to conduct training for staff. Canon also provided network support to help resolve any issues associated with how the council’s network was configured.

Results

“The savings and benefits for Scenic Rim from the Canon installation have exceeded expectations,” says Griffioen.

Having done an analysis of costs since the implementation was completed in December 2010, SRRC projects savings of $87,000 a year on its print costs alone, not including the paper savings that the implementation is generating. This is 24 percent above the costs savings the council hoped to achieve through the rationalization project.

By reducing the number of machines, fleet management has significantly improved. With only one vendor supplying and managing the print fleet, SRRC has streamlined consumable purchasing and significantly reduced its energy costs by replacing faxes, photocopiers, multifunction devices and desktop printers with just 32 Canon multifunction devices.

The implementation of uniFLOW’s statistics feature also enables SRRC to track print usage and attribute costs to the correct department, as well as highlighting the cost of color printing to staff.

Despite the majority of SRRC’s volume going through color machines, the fact that color usage has reduced significantly even though the availability of color has increased demonstrates that the uniFLOW solution is educating users and influencing behaviour.

Through the uniFLOW Universal Driver, when printing color documents, users receive a pop-up illustrating the cost differentiation of their print job between color and black and white. By exposing the difference in cost to users, budgets are factored in when deciding how to print, which helps influence user behavior.

Currently, 90 percent of SRRC’s print jobs are run through color machines, yet the percentage of color to black-and-white ratio has significantly reduced due to uniFLOW’s rules and routing function, which ensures all jobs default to black-and-white duplex.

These capabilities are key drivers in reducing Scenic Rim’s color usage from 37.8 percent to 22 percent.

Mark Griffioen, Scenic Rim Regional Council Corporate and Community Services Director, has spent many years managing various areas in local government. He is an experienced change manager who displays effective leadership and strong results through the development of teams. Mark has high-level contract negotiation and management capabilities through years of experience with various public and private sector organizations.