Case Studies

Ricoh Increases Insurance Company's Printing Efficiency

With an existing host print vendor contract set to expire, an industryleading insurance company was in search of a moreaffordable printing solution. Previously, the company printed large batches—up to 4,500 pages—of customer policies at a select number of print facilities, using host printing hardware that was expensive to own and operate. And because host printing output was declining as the company transitioned to digital document management, driving print jobs to existing multifunctional products (MFPs) was a much more affordable option.

After analyzing the company’s needs, Ricoh delivered a superior, costeffective solution—Intelligent Printer Data Stream (IPDS) page description language. The IPDS integration solution installs on the hard drive of Ricoh MFPs and printers and transforms Advanced Function Presentation (AFP) data controlled by IPDS to professional laser output. Ricoh helped the insurance provider perform two months of extensive in-lab testing to ensure the solution would meet the company’s printing requirements and provided hands-on support throughout the implementation process. The IPDS solution also proved the most cost-effective option, with operating costs that were 50 percent lower than competitive offerings.

Ease of deployment was a crucial benefit for the insurance company. The AFP/IPDS host printing solution streamlined the implementation process for the company’s IT staff, featuring a Web portal that allows the solution to be installed remotely. While other vendors’ solutions required the IT staff to make site visits and manually install the solution on individual host print devices, Ricoh’s AFP/IPDS solution enabled the staff to set up the host printing solution on any company MFP from a central location.

Xerox Competitive Product Development

Lean, optimized product development Xerox Corporation is the world’s leading document management technology and services company with the industry’s broadest product portfolio. Xerox offers digital color and black-and-white printing and publishing systems, digital presses and “book factories,” multifunction devices, laser and solid ink network printers, copiers and fax machines.

Xerox sells its products into a mature market where the competition is fierce (competitors include such well known companies as Ricoh, Canon, KonicaMinolta and Hewlett-Packard) and gains in market share are hard won. Like all the players in the high tech and electronics industry, Xerox is also dealing with an increasing number of mandates and regulations aimed at making its products less harmful to the environment.

“These are challenging times,” says Korhan Sevenler, the company’s director of Product Lifecycle Management (PLM). Sevenler’s mission is to make sure that Xerox’s product development systems keep pace with the industry’s challenges. Part of that, he says, includes a significant reduction in the time and cost of bringing new products to market. “Xerox must continue to deliver innovative, high quality solutions faster then ever,” he says. “But at the same time, we need to be spending less on our product development environment. The product development environment must be lean and highly optimized.” 

EFI OneFlow Gives Digital Color Graphics Big Gains in Speed and Productivity

Company Profile

Digital Color Graphics, an offset print operation in Southampton, PA, delivers high-end products quickly and cost-effectively – with amazing offset color quality. “We are the Mercedes of the short-run industry,” says Vice President Jim Rosenthal. Founded in 1997 by Jim and partner John Rosenthal, president, the company boasts $2 million in annual revenue and offers services from graphic design to website design and hosting. It turns out signs, banners and premium promotional items while its computer-to-plate print production department produces everything from corporate literature, post cards and direct mail pieces to elegant short-run catalogues – in a vast array of stocks and finishes – for local Fortune 500 companies and international firms.

Challenge

The computer-to-plate operation needed a solution that would reduce time-onsuming, error-prone, manual manipulation of customer files, decrease job turnaround time, and ensure exceptional document quality. It had to be cost-effective for a small 12-person shop, cut production costs and yield the kind of gains in efficiency and productivity that would give the owners more time to develop new business.

Solution

Digital Color Graphics chose EFI OneFlow™ software.

Global Manufacturer Streamlines, Goes Green

ABOUT THE CUSTOMER

SKF is a leading global supplier of rolling bearings, seals, mechatronics, lubrication systems and services. Founded in 1907, the company has over 200 manufacturing and operational locations and is represented in more than 130 countries. It is headquartered in Gothenburg, Sweden and employs more than 40,000 people worldwide. Its products and services are used in a wide variety of markets, including automotive, wind energy, rail, machine tooling, healthcare, paper and more.

CHALLENGE

Unsatisfied with its configuration of multiple manufacturers and providers, beginning in 2009 SKF Group IT chose to work with Ricoh as their primary provider. One of the main reasons why Ricoh won the business was its strong commitment to environmental sustainability. Another was its proven ability to help large organizations streamline their document management fleets, enabling companies to improve productivity using fewer devices.

The pilot project for the global solution was SKF’s North American headquarters, where they identified the perfect opportunity to put these two capabilities to the test. SKF had decided to consolidate three separate eastern Pennsylvania locations into a single new facility in Lansdale, PA. At the same time, the company knew its locations tended to have high device-to-person ratios. As every aspect of the new building would be planned to
meet LEED® standards, in accordance with the SKF Group’s broad-based sustainability initiative called SKF Care, it was a good test ground for Ricoh and SKF to develop a solution that could be rolled out globally.

Moving to a new facility gave SKF and Ricoh a chance to redesign the device fleets in three locations simultaneously, using the new headquarters as proof of concept, to show other SKF sites how an efficient, consolidated multifunctional device environment could not only reduce spending, improve transparency and workflow efficiency, but make a considerable impact on sustainability as well.

Working alongside SKF decision-makers, the Ricoh team began an intensive analysis of the fleets at three locations. What they found were 293 devices, ranging from printers, scanners, and copiers, supporting 400 employees, with multiple providers, supplies and service contracts in the mix. It was, as Mike Durante, Technology Manager for SKF, put it, “a very segregated and complex environment.” 

Ricoh Delivers Next Generation Print to Unilever Across Europe

Unilever, one of the world’s leading suppliers of fast moving consumer goods, has extended the scope of its Managed Document Services Agreement with  Ricoh from five to twenty seven countries across Europe. Ricoh will provide efficient and cost effective solutions for Unilever’s office and home working employees. The new services will provide a further return on investment by delivering increased efficiency across all Unilever’s European operations.

Flexible and Cost Effective

The ‘Next Generation Print’ Project in Europe includes the implementation of a range of solutions and services in the Ricoh portfolio that meet with Unilever’s requirements. The objective of the project is to implement a flexible and cost effective document management solution which focuses strongly on Unilever’s Green IT strategy. Ricoh and Unilever are working together to achieve this objective by:

  • Further optimising the print infrastructure throughout Europe
  • Meeting the latest Energy Star requirements
  • Introducing a Print Policy throughout Europe
  • Creating awareness of print costs and environmental impact
  • Reducing paper waste and power consumption
  • Offering greater functionality on new products
  • Reducing the number of model types throughout Europe

Myles Gilbertson, European Supply Manager at Unilever says, “I am pleased that we have extended our European contract with Ricoh. We now need to work together to further streamline our fleet through the  implementation of a new Managed Print Transformation Service and print policy. The ‘Next Generation Print Project’ will enable us to improve our environmental performance and monitoring as well as delivering further reductions in indirect costs.”

Toshiba America Electronic Components Completes Large-scale NAS Upgrade with F5 ARX

Toshiba America Electronic Components (TAEC) is an independent operating company owned by Toshiba America, Inc., a leader in advanced electronics. The San Jose, California division, which is responsible for the company’s semiconductor engineering, was facing significant challenges as it approached a lease-rollover necessitating a hardware upgrade of its NetApp™ Network-Attached Storage (NAS) environment as well as a major software upgrade. Toshiba needed a solution that would enable it to perform a complex migration of 70 terabytes of data without disruption to the critical design, verification, and test processes. By implementing F5 ARX® file virtualization, the company was able to complete the data migration without downtime. ARX has also enabled Toshiba’s IT staff to reduce operational expenditures and achieve greater flexibility in responding to changing business demands.

Business Challenge 

The development environment at Toshiba consisted of users distributed across multiple business units, as well as Sun and Linux compute nodes accessing data on multiple older NetApp devices. Toshiba wanted to move to newer NetApp devices, which required a data migration in excess of 70 terabytes (TB) in a 24x7 development environment with little tolerance for downtime.

In addition, a complex infrastructure with 10 different business units sharing many volumes across several different filers made it disruptive to expand volumes and modify quotas as each individual business unit’s needs evolved. Toshiba wanted to move to the latest version of NetApp’s Data ONTAP™ software in order to leverage the FlexVol™ capability that would allow business units to expand capacity as necessary. This required  a complex migration, consolidating data from multiple source volumes into discrete FlexVols on the new NAS devices.

EFI Color Profiler Suite Delivers Quality and Cost Savings

Pay Per Print

Many distributors and OEMs, through direct sales and resellers, provide what is known as a Pay Per Print, or a Pay Per Use solution. Pay Per Print allows customers with given print volumes to pay a flat rate that includes a fully maintained printing device and all consumables. Driven by EFI Fiery controllers, the dealers and OEMs are able to offer advanced color printing, including extensive color management, specific graphic arts feature sets, and a common workstation application for print room management. The solution provides the customer with the latest in print technologies, the piece of mind that service and support is on hand, and the knowledge of exactly how much each print is going to cost.

Solutions Provider Challenge

The challenge to offering an all-in-one solution, such as Pay Per Print, is to ensure that the costs of supplying, installing and maintaining the equipment, along with the variable costs of consumables such as paper and toner, is minimized to ensure profitability. Any increase in costs for the solution is directly borne by the supplier. In an effort to keep costs under control, the auditing of maintenance requests and consumables usage is a top priority.

Real World Example

Upon performing a consumables audit, the technical division of an OEM manufacturer located in Germany found that a particular customer was consuming a significantly less amount of toner compared to other customers. There was no reason to suspect the customer would not ask for replacement toner when it was required, as toner is included in the cost of the Pay Per Print solution.

British Waterways Saves $15 Million Annually with Combined Kofax and SharePoint Solution

Document Capture and Microsoft Records Management System Enables Documents to be Captured, Archived and Retrieved Easily and Efficiently 

Situation

British Waterways is responsible for protecting and maintaining approximately 2,200 miles of canals, rivers and waterways in England, Scotland and Wales. With more than 2,000 employees, British Waterways is the third largest proprietor of listed structures in the U.K. and owns more than 2,750 monuments, bridges, historic parks, heritage sites and battlefi elds. It also maintains more than 350 miles of conservation areas and 90 reservoirs.

As part of its charter, the company ensures waterways are safe and accessible for more than 13 million people who visit annually as well as more than 33,000 boats that operate in the waterways daily. 

Challenge 

British Waterways recently chose to relocate its headquarters to a corporate offi ce located in Watford, England. Due to the physical limitations of the new corporate offi ce, suffi cient storage space was scarce. A massive volume of paper records – boat licenses, renewal forms and related documents – was being stored in 100 large fi le cabinets and growing each day. With its available storage space declining, the company was looking for a solution to cost-effectively archive its large backlog of paper documents and electronically capture, archive and retrieve documents at a moment’s notice. 

In addition, many employees were relocated to multiple offi ces throughout the U.K. and needed quick access to customer documentation. However, with the company’s records department based in the city of Watford and its licensing and administrative departments based in the city of Leeds, employees were unable to locate documents effi ciently, which was hampering their ability to deliver prompt customer service.  

Toshiba Empowers Contact Center With RightNow Dynamic Agent Desktop

Replacing a Legacy System

At the end of 2008, Toshiba’s leaders realized that the current on-premise CRM solution wasn’t yielding the results they needed. The legacy agent desktop application Toshiba had in place in their contact centers was expensive to maintain. In addition, implementing changes was cumbersome and extremely time consuming, slowing the ability of Toshiba to react to changing market conditions. The company needed to make a strategic investment in a cost-effective, cloud-based contact center desktop solution to empower the business and position the company as a more customer support-centric organization.

“The legacy system was really inflexible,” explains Rhonda Watkins, Director of Call Center Operations at Toshiba. “To make changes, we had to go through a multi-step process which could take months. Because we couldn’t control it locally, the delay and expense of making changes became detrimental to enabling us to be fluid and reactive to our businesses.” 

With multiple databases for products and warranty, customer contact information, and parts and repair services, Toshiba’s agents often had difficulty locating the right information to help the customer in each call, which resulted in agent dissatisfaction and higher than desired turnover. The complexity of finding information also meant training new agents took longer and was more expensive.

Why RightNow

To find a replacement for the legacy system, Toshiba went through a rigorous RFP process that included five of the leading CRM solution providers. “We put the companies through stringent testing. The process took about a year,” Watkins explains. During the process Toshiba also looked at building an internal system. “When we showed the executives our analysis from the RFP process and the pricing, they had no doubts that the RightNow SaaS (software-as-a-service) solution was the right choice,” Watkins adds. Toshiba found RightNow’s cloud platform was designed for easy configuration and integration, unlike the company’s historic on-premise system which required coding and often a new release to make even the simplest change. The partnership between RightNow and Teleperformance, a leading out-sourced contact center provider, added confidence in the RightNow solution.

Genesis Hosting Solutions

Networks have traditionally been designed for resiliency, not for flexibility, and often performance suffers as the network grows and becomes increasingly complex and fragile. Service providers targeting enterprises operate “networks within networks” and are particularly challenged with the costs and issues of maintaining and scaling these complicated infrastructures.

Genesis Hosting Solutions, a virtual infrastructure hosting company headquartered in Chicago, IL, is focused on enterprise customers who require high availability for their applications. Genesis is tuned to the individual needs of these enterprises, offering personalized infrastructures, including a new, unique service leveraging VMWare to deliver instant cloud environments. To facilitate their growth and implement a manageable, flattened network structure with secure multi-tenant virtual networks, Genesis chose NEC ProgrammableFlow, now working in production at Genesis.

Challenges

Genesis is proud of their ability to offer high quality services for prices that are competitive and easy to understand. Their focus on high availability and quality service has laid the groundwork for continued expansion and growth. Yet their network infrastructure was expensive to maintain and a bottleneck to supporting next generation IT and business expansion. The ability to manage a large number of customer virtual environments, providing 5 nines of availability without complexity, was the goal.

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