Increasing Savings Through Managed Print Services

Submitted by sara on Tue, 10/04/2011 - 19:21

Cummins has 40,000 employees and global operations throughout 200 countries and territories. With such a vast distribution of locations comes the challenge of selecting, deploying, managing and maintaining technology – even output devices. Its existing fleet of printers, copiers, fax machines and scanners had aged and became prone to breakdowns that were increasing maintenance costs and negatively impacting device reliability and employee productivity. Cummins also wanted to further trim output costs and reduce paper consumption in support of its sustainability initiatives. These business goals became the genesis of a corporate-wide initiative called Print Smart — an aggressive project to optimize and standardize its entire printer fleet globally. Key needs revealed during the evaluation process included:

• The tracking of consumables – paper and toner.
• A desire to eliminate abandoned print jobs.
• Implementation of a consistent user interface for printers worldwide.
• Insight into employees’ usage habits.
• Standardized global service.

Following its analysis of available products, services, and customer support around the globe, Cummins chose Lexmark as its global managed print services provider. Under a comprehensive equipment leasing and asset management agreement, Lexmark is providing implementation, asset lifecycle, proactive consumables management, break/fix, and global help desk management, training, and maintenance services around the world.

Lexmark installed a combination of about 2,000 monochrome departmental printers and high volume monochrome and color multifunction printers (MFPs) around the world in approximately six months. Lexmark executed dozens of unique Local Country Agreements to ensure compliance with a wide array of legalities and standards. With a standardized and optimized Lexmark output environment around the world, employees experience the same user interface on every device in every location worldwide.

Cummins also implemented a solution that releases print jobs only when employees enter an identification code at Lexmark devices connected to the network. This approach has helped Cummins reduce its print volume by three million pages a month. That physical presence guarantees that confidential jobs print only when the document owner is physically present. It also eliminates the time gap between printing and pickup, preventing abandoned print jobs from piling up and avoiding paper and toner waste.

All of the output devices on the Cummins network are proactively monitored by Lexmark. The devices themselves actively report their health to a staff of engineers who can often take care of device issues before employees even notice. Lexmark engineers also integrated the entire device fleet with Cummins’ BMC® Remedy® Service Desk system for incident management and helpdesk support. Now, printer issues are logged with Cummins IT and calls are dispatched as necessary.

With proactive consumables management, the Lexmark devices also send alerts when toner gets low, and onsite Lexmark technicians replace the cartridge before a toner outage impacts employee productivity.

Cummins is on track to cut printing by an astonishing 36 million pages in just one year, generating a projected annual savings of $2 million. In overall costs, Cummins has seen its expenses drop by 62 percent on a monthly basis. The reduction in annual paper consumption saves the equivalent of 4,000 trees along with a projected greenhouse gas avoidance of 605 metric tons. By managing its use of color, Cummins reined in color printing from 600,000 pages per month to just 225,000, saving an additional $1.5 million annually. The 2,500 printers Cummins previously operated is down by about 16 percent, simplifying maintenance and lowering overall operating cost.

Visit www.lexmark.com to learn more.

Source: http://www.officeproductnews.net

Posted in: Lexmark,officeproductnews,Sara