Case Study 2 - Assisting a Council to reduce printing costs by 33%

Background
Printing costs represent a significant cost in councils. We have considerable experience of reducing our clients’ printing costs whilst maintaining the all important printing capability within the council. We have assisted clients of all sizes; from ones with many hundreds, in some cases thousands of printers to those with less than one hundred.

One mid range council had 600 printers, 200 models and 15 different suppliers. The council was printing just short of 10 million pages a year. Problems with equipment breakdown, dealing with a variety of different suppliers, sizeable stocks of supplies for many different printers and computer network problems took up a disproportionate amount of the time. In addition the council was planning to move towards a document management solution.

Approach
We conducted an online print review which was not intrusive and recorded everything happening on the printers. Our analysis revealed some startling results. A quarter of the printers were printing less than 10 pages a month and over 90% of documents produced were between 1 and 3 pages long, a significant proportion of which were e-mails.

We proposed a single supplier solution with charges based on a much more cost effective tariff, rather than the variety of different contracts in place previously. We placed a tender with leading suppliers and selected the most suitable solution on behalf of the client. The solution included facilities for integrating a document management system. In addition we started a consultative process to introduce efficient printing practices.

The Result
As well as making the procurement department's life easier there was a 33% annualised cost saving. We continue to work with the council to constantly ensure they are gaining the predicted returns, to raise the print cost and environmental consciousness in the council and we have started a programme of reviewing the usage of print.

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