Passing The Printed Buck

Voltas is one of the country's leading

engineering and consumer durables concern with HQ in Mumbai. The Mumbai HO was

facing a piquant problem with its huge printer set up, which constituted of 268

printers. The challenge was one of cost, resources management, and support. The

IT department was seriously burdened with the high number of printer support

calls.

Says Satish Bilgi, VP and CIO, Voltas, “We were looking

for a solution that will offer low printing cost per page and ease the

administration of print resources.” He further articulates that they had been

spending a huge amount on the maintenance since there was no accountability and

ownership of output as no one knew who was printing and how much.

According to Bilgi, the solution suggested was to use

between one to two network laser printers per floor and get the user wise

printer usage report. It was at this juncture that Voltas decided to use network

printers from Lexmark and outsource its printing requirements to a service

provider.

The outsourcing service provider selected was CMS, which

today owns, manages and maintains Voltas' print resources, and Voltas only

pays CMS for what it prints. Audit and resource administration features built in

the Lexmark printers and software was one of the reasons for this solution combo

to be selected.

A total of 15 printers consisting of T6xx mono laser

printers, were installed across four floors replacing over 160 deskjet printers.

Lexmark's MarkVision Professional software is used to administer and audit

these printers. This helped to lower the cost per page, as mono lasers were more

economical than inkjet printers. And another benefit derived was ease of

administration.

The implementation was executed by Lexmark representative

along with Voltas' IT Support Staff and CMS engineers. First, a pilot project

was implemented in the HR department using a single printer, and was run for a

period of two months. Thereafter, the remaining 14 printers were installed

across the four floors. The existing deskjet printers are still being removed in

a phased manner. However, a few inkjet printers are maintained and would be

retained for color printing.

According to Bilgi, there were no major implementation

challenges as the solutions were simple to implement. However, the Voltas' IT

staff had doubts about the acceptance of the solution by the end users. This

doubt was overcome when the pilot run on HR department was successful. There has

been continuous follow-up by the Lexmark representative as well as the CMS

engineers with end users.

Though too early to realize all the benefits, since the

project was completed in October 2005 only, Voltas has so far realized a 75%

reduction in man-hours related to printer support. A very significant benefit

was the fact that the company did not have to make a large capital investment in

purchasing new printers. A related benefit is that Voltas only pays for what it

prints, no more no less and since printing is outsourced, maintenance,

obsolesce, support and downtime are now the headache of the service provider

CMS. The printers are purchased and administered by CMS. And Voltas only pays

CMS for the number of pages it prints.

Low maintenance overhead was another crucial benefit as the

high duty network laser printers have a higher print cycle (10-175,000 pages/

month) as compared to desktop inkjet printers (1-2,000 pages/ month) and hence

more robust and suffer fewer breakdowns. There is now also accountability of

output ownership. Now they have user-wise printer usage report generated by

bundled printer management software. Post implementation, print volumes average

between 70-75,000 prints per month and there have been no issues so far.

The additional benefit offered by the solution was

confidentiality, while printing classified documents. Here, after the user sends

a print command, the printer does not print until the user reaches the printer

and enters his personal PIN number thus, ensuring that the printed documents

remains 'eyes only'.

Minu Sirsalewala



minuvs@cybermedia.co.in