Case Study

Company Profile:

In today’s dynamic business arena announcements of company mergers and acquisitions have become quite common. What may not be so familiar, however, is what happens after the announcement is made. The need to merge business operations and computing platforms is critical for success. Of course, this  must happen all while the new organization ensures superior service and customer continuity.

Before the merger, XRC was heavily focused in the On-Demand market, but realized that customers have further require-ments for mailing, statements and other documentoriented services. 

“We either had to build it ourselves or link with someone who added the services we lacked,” said Roger Gimbel, Director of Worldwide Operations and Marketing for Global Document Solutions, and president of XRC. ADM did not have an On-Demand business and was likewise studying the gaps in their service offerings and reaching a similar conclusion. “Merging versus building was a matter of economies, time and the ability to expand immediately. We accomplished it in three months rather than three years,” declared Gimbel.

Frimley Park Hospital NHS Foundation Trust
is an outstanding hospital facility offering care and treatment to residents of North Hampshire, West Surrey and East Berkshire. In recent Care Quality Commission annual ratings the Trust has been judged “excellent” for value for money and “excellent” or “good” for quality, with maternity services being ranked the best in the London and the South East region. The Trust requires excellent use of resources across all fields, both clinical and non-clinical, in order to maintain its high standards of operational excellence.

Print Environment:

Print Fleet: 1000+ devices
Deployment environment: wards, reception, finance, administration, communications department.
Challenges:

• Achieving reliable service and support for device
• Adequate training for in-house support staff
• Product reliability in a high volume environment
• Managing multiple brands;
• High consumables expenditure.

The Benefits of a Kyocera Solution: 

Accurate analysis of client requirements and bespoke configuration
of the new system:

KYOCERA delivered a tailored service incorporating dedicated
account management, detailed technical site visits to ensure correct
device specification for all areas of the Trust, and the development
of a deployment optimally designed for efficiency and productivity.

Training and support

KYOCERA provided comprehensive device training which ensures
that Trust personnel can deliver their own SLA’s to users. The
Trust’s positive experience of KYOCERA’s in-house support centre
was also a key factor in the decision to standardize on KYOCERA.

IDC OPINION

In today's already constrained datacenters, deduplication technology yields storage footprint and cost savings. IT executives are reporting significant reductions in storage costs from several perspectives including capacity, physical footprint, power, and cooling. Additionally, deduplication is an extremely relevant and timely technology as datacenter consolidation and virtualization often result in the rearchitecture of traditional backup processes. In particular, virtualization drives changes across the IT infrastructure encompassing server, network, storage, and data protection initiatives. As firms look to replace tape with disk-based approaches to data protection, the economic advantages of data deduplication cannot be overlooked.

The leading supplier of data deduplication technology from a real-world
implementation and market penetration perspective is Data Domain. Although it is difficult to define a typical installation (because Data Domain has installations across many industries and within many types of application workloads and capacities), the customer represented in this case study in many ways has characteristics that make it "ripe" for data deduplication. These include a technology refresh for backup hardware, a requirement to improve backup windows, a move to disk-based backup and archive, and initiatives to virtualize the environment.

IN THIS BUYER CASE STUDY

This IDC Buyer Case Study describes the implementation of Data Domain's
deduplication storage systems at a division of a Fortune 50 financial services firm. In 2007, this firm evaluated deduplication technology from several vendors in an effort to optimize storage infrastructure and reduce backup disk capacity while also improving backup processes and data protection/recovery. The bank selected Data Domain to do its superior dedup ratio (in proof of concept [POC] testing and also once deployed)
and starting in March 2008 did a several month "phase-in" implementation of these storage systems across 13 datacenters (both primary and disaster recovery sites).

Company Profile

Westar Energy is the largest electric energy provider in Kansas, serving more than half-a-million business and residential customers. Headquartered in Topeka, Kansas, Westar Energy employs about 2,200 people, and serves more than 674,000 customers throughout East and East-Central Kansas. Westar Energy has energy centers that generate more than 6,100 megawatts of electricity, which is transferred over  33,000 miles of transmission and distribution lines. 

Business Challenges

Westar Energy’s immediate challenge was to find a content management and business automation system that would work with their ever increasing paper processing workload. Their first initiative was to integrate the existing IBM Content Manager document management solution (DMS) with the Accounts Payable system to store invoice images that were being outsourced for microfiche.

With a service territory covering more than 10,000 square miles and over 50 remote offices, you can imagine the volume of invoices that flows through Westar’s Accounts Payable department. Some of the invoices arrive in a good condition, but others are handwritten, illegible or scribbled on a crumpled piece of paper. So, Westar faced a major challenge in improving their Accounts Payable system in terms of both the volume of invoices and the quality.

In addition, Westar also wanted to integrate their existing IBM Content Manager DMS with the new content capture and business automation solution. This would allow a number of time and cost-saving functions, such as centrally scanning invoices for access and retrieval by Westar’s remote offices. And, of course, all of this needed to happen while keeping customer service up and costs down.

Background

Located in the Southwest U.S., this hospital and medical center is a not-for-profit hospital with over 700 beds that provides a wide range of health, social and support services, with special advocacy for the poor and underserved. It’s a highly accredited and nationally recognized center with a variety of specialties. The hospital is part of a 40+ member hospital system in Arizona, California and Nevada.

The Challenge

For over a decade, Xerox has provided the services and technologies to handle key document-related functions for the hospital as outsourced services. These have included management of the hospital’s production center and service for all on-site equipment, plus a move to print-on-demand document production, with initial yearly savings of more
than $500,000. 

And the cost of document production was the early focus. But as time went on, it became apparent that the real challenge was to find additional savings beyond the cost of equipment itself. After all, a printer isn’t cheaper if no one is using it, so utilization rates moved into the spotlight. 

In addition, new legal requirements related to the use of health information and patient privacy have reinforced the importance of making the right document-production purchases and adhering to specific processes. According to the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, hospitals and their vendors are required to notify patients within 60 days if patient data is breached—or risk steep fines.

Once again, the hospital turned to the Xerox team for help with meeting the daily demands of staff, patients and regulators, in addition to the ongoing need to cut costs. 

After years of hosting marketing events and concerts featuring everyone from snowboarders to rock bands, Lindsay Stevens Gardner found herself bothered by something: “I was hauling an insane amount of trash out of these venues.” That observation became her motivation to create Rock the Green, a near-zero waste music festival in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

To host a maximum-impact festival for music lovers and keep the environmental impact to a minimum, Gardner, executive director of Rock the Green, sought out innovative partners and sponsors, including Joe Jones, president of Big Systems. As an HP-authorised, wide-format reseller, Big Systems had just the solution Gardner needed for the event’s signage: HP HDPE Reinforced Banner1 and HP Latex Printing Technologies.

With the help of high-caliber HP Latex printing systems and materials designed with the environment in mind—and Big Systems—Rock the Green created a dynamic, outdoor venue for music and environmental education, while also meeting its near-zero waste goal.

Premium Durability—Lower Environmental Impact

Thanks to HP HDPE Reinforced Banner, Rock the Green, a nonprofit organisation, reduced its environmental impact and met its waste-reduction
goals—without sacrificing performance. As an in-kind donation, HP and Big Systems provided the ink, printing materials, and labour needed to produce the festival’s 162 signs totalling 413.88 m2 (4,455 sq ft).

Challenge

Burgeoning costs for supplies, salaries, equipment, and institutional overhead had put the University of Louisville’s Printing and Copier Management unit into a very tight spot. After years of operating at a loss, it had racked up a seven-figure deficit. The UofL administration charged Bob Knaster to either fix or close the operation.

“Coming from another position within the IT department, I was experienced at turning budgets around. But I knew less about printing—and I had some tough decisions to make,” says Knaster. “So I asked our vendors to help us turn this situation around, and Xerox did not hesitate to step up.”

Solution

To begin the critical transformation to a self-sustaining unit, Xerox first provided a black belt analyst to identify areas for improved operational efficiency. The list of recommendations included suggestions for redesigning the work space, reorganizing workflow, consolidating responsibilities, and improving metrics and documentation. These efforts helped, but weren’t enough.

“The in-plant was busy, had solid revenue, and great people,” says Knaster, “but its operating costs were completely out of control.”

So Xerox turned its focus to the in-plant’s digital printing equipment. Here, two key issues were identified: the underutilization of some assets, and the inability of others to serve as true backups. What was needed was to “right size” the equipment mix in order to meet quality, turnaround, and availability needs while also reducing costs.

Each year in the United States, an estimated 87 billion pieces of direct mail are sent to the public. This requires mail fulfillment houses to operate quickly and efficiently for their customers who outsource the printing and mailing functions of their direct mail campaigns. Ricoh Printing Systems of America (Ricoh) supplies printing hardware for a number of companies in this space, but one particular Mail Fulfillment company has a national retailer as one of its largest clients with challenging requirements. Mass mailings announcing the opening of a new store are an ongoing project, with strict deadlines for completion.

Before consulting with the Ricoh Professional Services Group, the Mail Fulfillment company was experiencing major bottlenecks. The customer
was printing a large number of form letter documents, using Microsoft
Word to merge the variable data fields, which is a notoriously slow
process. The printed output was running at only about 20 to 25 pages per
minute (ppm) and the age of the printers was becoming an issue. Simply
put, faster production was needed. With the company’s total print volume
exceeding two million pages per month, a whole new method of
production was needed, in addition to newer and faster printers.

In order to decrease costs as well as the length of time print jobs were
taking, the Mail Fulfillment company consulted Ricoh and an entirely new
streamlined production process was developed. The company purchased
the Ricoh DDP 70e, a digital printer that can support printing volumes up
to 600,000 pages per month. The Ricoh DDP 70e was also combined with
Objectif Lune’s PlanetPress software that can automatically merge
variable data fields into the body of a form letter. This printer centric
software helped speed up the process so dramatically that the Ricoh
DDP 70e can run at its full rated speed of 70 ppm.

Background

RWS is recognised as one of the world's leading patent translation and search companies.
It performs this work primarily for clients in the chemical, engineering, pharmaceutical and legal
fields. Today the group employs over 350 staff with operating companies in the UK, USA, Japan
and Germany, and sales offices in France and Switzerland.

The Challenge

RWS’ business is a document-intensive operation, producing millions of pages per year in translation work for its customers. In addition to the patent translation service RWS performs, in recent years it has seen a rapid expansion of its business in the commercial translation field. Specifically, the
business has grown to include the translation of larger documents such as instruction manuals, company brochures and web sites.

Traditionally RWS stored documents as multi-page TIF images. In 2007, RWS decided that this method of storage was no longer sufficient. In order to get a better handle on these documents, RWS needed a solution that could convert scans of newly translated documents into searchable PDF format and then deposit the output in a digital archive. RWS has always put a strong emphasis on finding technological solutions for its everyday business needs and set out to find the best solution to help with the large scale conversion of its documents.

The Solution

After thorough discussions of the challenges facing RWS, ABBYY recommended Recognition Server as the most appropriate solution. Recognition Server is a robust and powerful server-based solution, designed for mid- to high-volume document processing across large departments and enterprises. It can be deployed as both a standalone program and an integral part of a third-party system such as DMS, RMS and electronic archiving system. Routine document conversion processing occurs automatically and unattended.

Background

Medical Mutual of Ohio is a health insurance company headquartered in Cleveland, Ohio.
As a regional insurer, they are deeply committed to their members. They are also the official health insurer of the Cleveland Cavaliers, the Cleveland Indians and the Cleveland Browns.

After conducting thorough studies of their equipment assets and usage, they realized there was an opportunity to consolidate to reduce costs and better serve their clients with more efficient office operations.

The Challenge

Starting in 2008, Medical Mutual of Ohio tested Xerox® ColorQube Multifunction Printers against three competitors. They installed different manufacturers’ products in different locations across their operation over a significant length of time to test capabilities and performance in the real world.

“We looked at multiple vendors,” says Lyn Duvall, Manager of Printing Services. “We had to try the equipment. Get it in our shop and have people who were really going to use them try them all. We threw whatever we could possibly think of at the equipment. We wanted to see if the units could
really multitask, if they can do two things at a time. These are things that will impact a workflow. We looked at security, of course, but we also looked at how quickly we got answers from people who could help us when we asked questions.”