South West Alliance of Rural Health – The benefit of lowering running costs.
The South West Alliance Of Rural Health (SWARH) is an Alliance of public health agencies in the South West of Victoria covering an area of approximately 60,000 square kilometres connecting all public acute hospitals and associated health services in a region extending from west of Melbourne to the South Australian Border. Their members range from big hospitals down to doctor’s surgeries and smaller bush nursing hospitals.

SWARH was formed in late 1997 to focus on the development of IT for the Acute Public Hospitals in the South West Region of Victoria. In addition to the financial incentive provided by the Department of Human Services, the SWARH Alliance has been fortunate to have a group of Chief Executive Officers and Hospital Boards who, although not technically expert, have appreciated the fact that as individual agencies, the capacity to invest in technology to improve service delivery and gain returns on the investment required was not possible on their own.

At the end of 2007 SWARH went through the tender process to select a single supplier for all their printing and multi function device (MFD) needs. The key criteria in their selection were service delivery to their vast and dispersed network of members, as well as running costs.

A Single Solution for Information Capture
Kofax is focused on the first and most vital step in information management: consistently capturing the various types of data that exist throughout your organization, in the highest quality possible, and indexing it all so you can easily find it again. Whether your information is on paper or in electronic files, whether it is parked at a central office or scattered on desktops and remote offices throughout the world, Kofax can help you capture it all quickly and accurately.

Ascent Capture accelerates business processes by collecting paper documents, forms and e-documents, transforming them into accurate, retrievable information, and delivering it all into your business applications and databases. It offers unmatched compatibility with scanners and other capture devices, plus content and document management systems, workflow applications and databases. No matter what hardware or enterprise applications you choose now or in the future, you can count on Ascent Capture to ensure consistent capture, indexing and validation of your important information.

Protect your multifunction products, output, network communications, and management with HP.
Despite the critical roles networked imaging and printing resources play in the processes and workflows of large and small organizations alike, IT professionals frequently ignore security threats to the imaging and printing infrastructure and often leave it entirely unsecured. Imaging and printing environments aren’t currently a primary target for network attacks, but this will likely change as hackers find traditional servers more difficult to exploit and look for other targets.

If IT fails to safeguard these valuable resources beforehand, attacks against unsecured network communications can endanger data confidentiality, which can increase litigation exposure and compromise compliance with government and industry regulations like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, the Patriot Act, the California Database Protection Act of 2001, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLB), the Basel II Accord, the IPv6 Mandate, and SEC rules.1 For example, print and digital-send jobs sent via traditional 802.11x networking can be intercepted, compromising the confidentiality and integrity of the information.

Imaging and printing security threats will undoubtedly increase. For instance, the Computer Security Institute reported in its 2005 CSI/FBI Computer Crime and Security Survey that unauthorized access rose dramatically in the last year and replaced denial of service as the second most significant contributor to computer crime losses. And recent publications by hacker groups have raised the awareness that imaging and printing devices are more than simple appliances and that these devices have capabilities beyond printing and scanning. Unauthorized data access isn’t the only problem, either — denial-of-service strikes against networked MFPs and printers can diminish productivity, and unauthorized device usage can deplete consumables stocks and increase supplies costs.

Are You Asking Yourself…

• How much am I really spending on desktop, workgroup, internal production print, and outside print services?
• How do our total document expenses compare to those of our key competitors?
• What factors contribute to these costs?
• How much money can we save and how?
• How much of an investment in time and money is needed to assess my document costs?
• Does this require a detailed on-site audit?

Challenges

• Getting to the true cost of documents across your organization
• Cost reductions
• Determining peer performance & benchmarking
• Developing an enterprise document strategy
• Increasing efficiency & optimization

Introduction & Objectives
The proliferation of output devices such as printers, copiers, fax machines, and scanners has significantly contributed to the dramatic increase in document output volume and cost over the years. While the majority of today’s organizations acknowledge the potential savings from better document management, many still lack the understanding and expertise to address the problem. Third-party providers including office equipment manufacturers, document outsourcing firms, and independent service providers are offering assessment services that focus on identifying costs and inefficiencies around document output.