Teacher’s Credit Union buys, saves and meets its targets
Teacher’s Credit Union buys, saves and meets its targets
October 22, 2007: When it came time to overhaul the printing fleet a the Teacher’s Credit Union, some revaluations, an environmental commitment and internal thinking slashed a blueprint plan of 55 – 64 printers, down to just 30.
Two main branches, 320 staff, a fully functional banking service and thousands of members, the Teacher’s Credit Union (TCU) may not yet be ready to go paperless, but they’re still keen to eliminate waste, reduce costs and drive up efficiencies. An aging and underutilised printer fleet was a good place to start.
Colin Thomas, IT Manager at TCU was charged with the task of replacing printers across the organisation. For Thomas, it was a quick win as he’d only recently taken up the position, and a good opportunity for him to leave an early mark and impression on his colleagues.
“When I started to look at the project a little closer,” says Thomas. “It was very clear that I would need to look at the task strategically, as opposed to swapping printers one for one.”
It’s not just in-house reports, spread sheets, PDFs, and the usual internal needs cramming the printers at TCU. “There’s also another aspect in that we do a lot of correspondence for members. Our training department spends a fair bit of money on this and we try to produce high-quality documentation, people really want things they can hold,” says Thomas.
Originally pencilling out a need for 55 – 64 printers, Thomas went back and revaluated the printing needs of staff including colour and speed requirements. The revaluation was an eye-opener. Thomas found by picking up more colour functionalities and removing printers used for more redundant tasks like stationary, he could slash their original requirement down to 30 devices.
The revaluation of printing needs involved some detective work from the IT team. “We deployed software tools to record all the devices and print types to come up with the numbers we needed,” says Thomas. Provided by Lexmark and integration partner Imagetec, the tools are still in operation to record pages and printing volumes, a nifty appliance for a recent internal commitment by TCU to meet environmental obligations and reduce paper consumption.
“We recently published a sustainability report, and made a commitment to the board to reduce printing consumption by 10 percent,” says Thomas. “I’m quite confident we can achieve that and go on to do other things without printing.”
After the ‘right-fit’ analysis from Lexmark and Imagetec along with a competitive bid, Thomas contracted them to provide ongoing support, maintenance services and print supplies to TCU. Believing the Lexmark relationship will last for years to come, he refers to them as a ‘challenger brand’ similar to the Virgin and Vodafones of the world. “I look at HP as being the 800 pound gorilla and the other guys as being the ones who are really leading the creative charge,” he says.
Meanwhile simple processes work to meet TCU’s environmental commitment. By deploying a price-per-page mentality, an awareness of personal costs and the advantages of double-sided printing, Thomas and his team are crafting internal changes within the organisation. “I did a bit of a road-show, about 10 or so presentations, and told them all about the features and functionality available, so they can exploit all that to reduce their personal costs.”
Already TCU has achieved significant results from deploying the Lexmark solution. Thomas has reduced acquisition and ongoing management costs including a reduction in consumerables of 65 percent. Mono print costs been slashed from $0.04 to $0.015 per page while colour has dropped from 25 to 10 cents. TCU has also benefited from the functionality of smarter devices including more streamlined IT management process, greater confidentiality and security of documents and faster printing.
“The most important element of the whole process was to make the right decision for the long-term and not just the short term,” says Thomas. “In the financial services industry, technology is a key business enabler and competitive differentiator.”
Moving on, Thomas is looking to expand on the relationship to branch out to print-on-demand, and implement high-quality printers in branches. While TCU does not yet have a formal document management system, Thomas is looking to explore options over the course of the financial year, especially to meet the compliance and archiving needs of the department.