THE CHALLENGE
Prior to Austereo becoming a customer, it had an unmanaged output fleet with 200 devices and 1,000 staff in its offices nationally. As a highly sales focussed organisation, Austereo makes heavy use of colour sales presentation and therefore colour printing.
An audit verified that a small percentage of the devices were being over utilised, which increased maintenance costs and reduced the life span of the equipment. A larger proportion were underutilised which dramatically increased running costs. With more than 60 different types and makes of printers, copiers, fax machines and other output equipment support and supplies costs were amplified.
The number of different machines also increased help desk calls as users required a higher level support with different device interfaces as Technology Director Des DeCean recalled:
“About 25% of our Help Desk calls were output-related. Every time the phone rang, we’d have no idea what sort of equipment the user had and so it was a very difficult support environment. We had a lot of users with personal printers that weren’t networked, so we’d typically have to send a technician to the local desktop – which really defeats the purpose of having a national telephone Help Desk in the first place.”
Upstream’s challenge was to consolidate the printer to reduce costs and maximise device efficiency while helping manage the average cost per page with Austereo’s unusually high volume of colour printing.
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