Beauchamps Solicitors, with its prominent technology and intellectual property legal advice group and its own sophisticated IT systems, has a progressive approach to using technology to improve business processes. However, while acknowledging the coming benefits of electronic stamping and conveyancing, the firm sees little to persuade it that the paperless office is a credible option at this stage.
Even with relatively routine paper-based tasks, the overhead involved in inputting and managing the documentation in a digital environment is still significant. Cost-wise it just doesn’t add up.
Where Beauchamps, and indeed other professional service companies, do find benefits are in managed print services. The decision to use a third-party was triggered when the company moved to modern open plan offices in Grand Canal Docks in Dublin’s new legal district.
It was an opportunity to review their systems. They began to look at how feasible it would be to consolidate printers and come up with a system that suited the new premises that are open plan.
Serving the needs of 150 users the old printing and imaging infrastructure had worked well but was open to improvement. Beauchamps partners saw an opportunity to cut costs, consolidate the hardware and create a centralised print and output environment that was easier to manage.
With the old system a collection of standalone printers and photocopiers were distributed around the various departments supported by a separate inhouse scanning solution, but output volumes were increasing dramatically and it was becoming a little unwieldy.
The firm identified technological advances that could cope with the growth. Its IT people could see that a new generation of multifunction machines were more practical. At this stage they were tried and tested, reliable and more than capable of taking on heavy duty work.
Ergo Managed Services won the contract, a leading name in print and output solutions for over a decade. It would retain ownership of all the hardware, provide all the maintenance, toners and cartridges, and agreed a fixed price contract for 4 years related to expected volumes of print . An engineer will go on site for a half day every quarter for preventative maintenance duties.
Within a matter of weeks they had successfully migrated Beauchamps to the new imaging infrastructure. It was kitted out with six HP 9050 MFPs, strategically placed on a departmental basis, supplemented by the HP 9065 and HP 9500 in the print room for high volume jobs.
Not only could a single MFP fulfil the core functions of printing, copying scanning and faxing, they also came with other features that would prove useful to the company. The HP ‘FollowMe’ printing facility gives the option for only authorised users to pick up their own documents from a printer using personalised swipe cards.
One key crucial aspect to the successful migration was training all users on the new system. People had to quickly become proficient in faxing, copying, scanning , printing and using the FollowMe features. With less machines available in a busy office environment it was crucial to operational efficiency that everyone received proper training - if one person got into a jam, it could hold up many others. Ergo provided on-site training to all over several weeks and Beauchamps adopted the training into their own in house induction programme.
The new processes cut down on paper waste - unclaimed documents left at printers are reduced – and protects confidentiality which is important to a legal firm. A facility to support cost monitoring is also available. Each user can input a client code to make sure print costs are accurately allocated.
Further savings came with double sided or duplex printing. Beauchamps wanted it from an environmental and a cost point of view and it’s now the default arrangement across the print fleet. But the biggest benefit is that with a small number of strategically placed machines users have all the services that they want - copying, printing, faxing and scanning.
The service has proved consistently reliable and Beauchamps have been happy with Ergo as the third-party provider. Servicing the machines and dealing with technical problems has been efficient, but one of the biggest benefits is that they only have to deal with a single supplier rather than multiple vendors with different service level agreements.
Coming at the partnership from the supplier’s perspective, John Purdy, managing director of Ergo, found that Beauchamps had a greater understanding of its print function than most organisations. “They were able to give a very clear picture of their usage and costs. In our experience a lot of companies don’t know what print and outputting is costing them. We were able to go in quickly, centralise the environment and make it more efficient with strategically positioned MFPs and save them money and indeed reduce their carbon footprint in the process.”