The Client: Gill & Macmillan

The Business Need: The challenge for most companies is about bringing print volumes down, but not for Gill & Macmillan. Industrial levels of printing are integral to its publishing business so the goal is to control costs and make it more efficient.

The Solution: Ergo IT Infrastructure designed and deployed a homogenous printing estate that could leverage the latest technology to continually improve the print output performance.

The Benefits: Ergo worked with Gill & Macmillan’s to achieve significant saving in overall office printing costs and increased the efficiency of a deadline-centric business where time is money.

The Business Need
For most businesses, managing print means imposing rules and processes to reduce output and save money. For Gill & Macmillan this was never an option. As Ireland’s largest publisher, printing out proofs and galleys for its latest books is an integral part of the publishing process. The challenge is not about reducing the number of pages, but printing as cost-effectively and efficiently as possible.
 
For more than five years Ergo and Gill & Macmillan have been working together to extract more value out of the networked print infrastructure. The company has recently renewed its managed print service contract with Ergo, a partnership forged on the principals of bringing new technology to bear on the Gill & Macmillan printing estate.

The sheer volume is a relentless challenge. Gill & Macmillan prints out millions of pages a year. Colour prints alone can account for nearly a million.

The company publishes school books, for example, with hundreds of colour pages. Each book has to be printed out in galley form, in colour, and proofed for corrections. Others can be output in black and white as either A3 or A4. In addition to the editorial requirement, an active marketing department also draws heavily on the hardware to create collateral that has to be printed and proofed in colour.

Before working with Ergo, Gill & Macmillan outsourced the bulk of its printing requirements to a business stationery firm. While it relieved the company of industrial levels of printing, it was inefficient and costly to the business.

“We had to courier our files to a third-party print service which added to the cost. They would return the printed out proofs and our readers could get started,” explained Vincent Hunt, ICT Director at Gill & Macmillan. “Not only was it expensive, it was also inefficient. It could take at least a day to get the pages back to an editor.”

Book publishers like Gill & Macmillan are always working back from print deadlines and there is a constant pressure to meet print slots, often with printers in Europe and the Far East. Time is money, so there was a drive to find a more efficient way of doing things.

The Solution
Gill & Macmillan took the decision to take its high volume printing in-house, using Ergo to run the entire estate as a fully managed service. It was also an opportunity to bring in other processes and hand them over. Photocopying, for example, had been the responsibility of the company’s facilities department. Now it has been made part of the print and output entity and the responsibility of Ergo.

Individual desktop inkjets were removed, the hardware consolidated, and a disparate collection of kit and consumables replaced with one brand, HP. Serving the needs of 70 employees, most of whom occupy two floors in the company’s Dublin office, Ergo fitted Gill & Macmillan out with ten networked mono printers and three colour multifunction printers (MFPs) at key locations in the office.

A modern networked print environment brings other benefits, but Gill & Macmillan is one customer where functionality beyond faster printing is largely redundant. The one exception is the scan-to-email feature. “We have authors, proof-readers and editors spread across the country that we can now email proofs to straight away. It’s been a really useful feature for us,” said Hunt.   

While the primary focus has been on efficient printing, Hunt also recognises the benefits of secure print and tracking solutions. “You are able to see costs allocated to specific parts of the company, right down to individual employee level. It would be a bit of a cultural shift for a book publisher but we might go that way at some point. With the infrastructure we have, people are already far more aware of waste and less inclined to print off one page emails.”

A big benefit of an Ergo managed print service is the transparency. Payments are quarterly, based on an agreed price-per-page. At the same time, the two parties conduct a review of the relationship, auditing print volumes and adjusting costs accordingly. It is also an opportunity to discuss new innovations and technologies that could improve the Gill & Macmillan infrastructure.

“The level of print is very high for a company of 70 employees,” said Helen Curry, Business Development Manager at Ergo. “So every time HP brings out new hardware that delivers lower cost print - and lower cost colour in particular - we bring it to their attention. It is an ongoing challenge that we try to help them address.

The Benefits
Ergo has transformed a fundamental part of Gill & Macmillan’s business, saving time and money by bringing industrial levels of printing in-house as a managed service. “The financial payback has been excellent but the real saving is in the flexibility and agility that the Ergo infrastructure has given us,” said Vincent Hunt.

Editorial teams are now able to run out proofs beside their desks, pick them up immediately and get down to work, as opposed to waiting for a courier to collect and return documents which could easily take a day. “The big saving is time, and if you save time you are saving money,” said Hunt.

He also values the level of innovation that Ergo can bring to the business. “Five years ago we had four network printers and a lot of standalone printers and no sense about what the technology was capable of. Now we can use Ergo to leverage the very latest developments out of a printer manufacturer like HP.”

Print has become a valued part of the company’s IT infrastructure, managed effectively to benefit the bottom line and as vital as an email server to its business. At the same time, the managed service means performance is always optimised while relieving the internal IT department of the burden of running it. Hunt and his team can concentrate on more strategic IT projects for the business.

The managed service is wrapped in service level agreements that remove the risk of downtime. Ergo monitors the infrastructure remotely, proactively tackling issues before they become a problem.  “Their support and flexibility has been excellent,” said Hunt. “Everyone at Ergo is committed to the cause, from the newest print engineer right through to the senior management. We have full access to all areas of Ergo, and if we have a problem at 5pm on a Friday evening, we know they will be here to sort it out,” said Hunt.