Lexmark

By Lyndsey Gilpin March 6, 2014

Think about how many times you've started printing a document and realized there was a mistake. You try to cancel it, but pages are already spewing out the printer. Or another common situation: you don't want all those excess pages with photos, ads, and hyperlinks. You leave it in the printer bed. On a good day, someone puts the paper in the recycling bin. The majority of the time, however, the pages are tossed in the trash, only to pile up in a landfill unnecessarily. 
One in six pages of printed paper is never picked up, and in the entire lifetime of a printer, up to 80 percent of the machine's carbon impact comes from the amount of pages printed.

Several years ago, Lexmark saw this enormous discrepancy in the printing industry, and decided to act on it. Customers were getting a lot more conscious about how much they were printing, while Lexmark and other printer companies focused all their marketing around helping businesses print more.

LAS VEGAS, NV, February 12, 2014 – Integrating, automating and digitizing document solutions is a precise process leading to optimum workflow, and there will be several sessions on this critical technology area at the 2014 ITEX National Conference and Expo. ITEX brings experts in this market together to help you discover the best solutions in leaving paper behind in favor of digital processes meant to transform you and your customers’ business operations. Attendees will find the tools, profits and best market strategies available during this premier event for the office channel, bringing together thousands of dealers, resellers, VARs, MSPs, and vendors taking place at the Rio Las Vegas, March 12-13.

Among the dozens of sessions being offered, several will focus on Document Workflow and Enterprise Solutions in the Automate Track, sponsored by Platinum Sponsor DocuWare. President of DocuWare Thomas Scheck is excited about this year’s ITEX stating "we are looking forward to the great opportunity that ITEX affords us for important conversations with today’s decision makers in the office automation channel and how together we can leverage the vast opportunities in the Enterprise Document Management space."

Organization

Cummins is the world’s largest independent manufacturer of diesel engines and related products. The company reported 2010 revenue of $13.2 billion and serves its customers through 550 company-owned and independent distributor facilities, and more than 5,000 dealer locations in 200 countries and territories.

Challenge

Cummins is a company with 40,000 employees and global operations throughout 200 countries and territories. With such a vast distribution of locations comes the challenge of selecting, deploying, managing and maintaining technology—even output devices. Whether at its U.S. or remote operating sites worldwide, Cummins employees need to print, copy, fax and scan critical business documents reliably. 

“Whether it is Russia or places like Zambia and Zimbabwe in Africa, there are significant challenges to providing IT service, and that is a critical business requirement for us regardless of the physical location,” said Bruce Smith, Cummins’ Director of Computing Services. 

Its existing fleet of output devices had aged and became prone to breakdowns that were increasing maintenance costs and negatively impacting device reliability and employee productivity. At the same time, Cummins wanted to further trim output costs and reduce paper consumption in support of its sustainability initiatives. These business goals and challenges became the genesis of a corporatewide initiative Cummins inaugurated called Print Smart.

By Amber E. Watson

Traditional print hardware providers view managed print services (MPS) and managed document services (MDS) as a priority strategy for serving enterprise users.

Randy Dazo, senior director, solutions and services, office group, InfoTrends, notes an interest among manufacturers in penetrating this vertical market as a means of differentiating oneself from the competition. "End users seek cost savings, which is always a competitive factor among manufacturers, but the role of MDS allows the vendor to provide true value differentiation," he states.

Management services allow a customized engagement with customers. Dazo says that with escalating costs, changing needs, and environmental concerns intensifying each year, relevant MPS and MDS solutions cater to current trends and continue to meet customer demands.

Executive Summary

Not long ago, Amica found itself maintaining a problematic fleet of printers. Significant time was being spent maintaining printers, handling help desk calls to correct printer problems, ordering toner and managing the complexities of an aging, diverse printer fleet with units spread across 39 separate branch locations and at headquarters.

Amica turned to its long-time partner, Lexmark, to help the company reduce output costs, improve the performance of its devices and reduce the administrative and IT burden of maintaining the devices. In just under two months, Lexmark replaced all of the legacy printers at Amica and established a distributed fleet management (DFM) partnership with Lexmark that has significantly reduced its printer maintenance and management costs.

As part of the agreement, Lexmark replaced all of Amica’s printers with new, faster and more feature-rich devices, began monitoring the devices proactively over the network to diagnose issues before they impacted end users and established a plan so that it would automatically detect toner-low conditions so that replacement cartridges could be shipped just in time to the right location, rather than stockpiling back-ups.

The Company 

Lexmark International is a leading developer, manufacturer and supplier of printing and imaging solutions for offices and homes. Their products are sold in more than 150 countries in North and South America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, the Pacific Rim and the Caribbean.

The Challenge

Prior to engaging SiteHawk, Lexmark utilized an in-house system and personnel for MSDS management. While the company was able to maintain regulatory compliance and a safe employee environment, company management felt that there was a better way to manage critical chemical data information.

Specifically, Lexmark wanted a solution that compiled chemical data in a consistent fashion across the organization, providing site-level data for the manufacturing plants, but also furnishing a corporate view of chemical and MSDS information to achieve better visibility and control across the organization. Furthermore, they were looking for an outsourced solution that would assume the daily chore of acquiring, updating, and maintaining the tens of thousands of MSDS documents stored internally.

The consumerisaton of IT, due in part to ‘bring your own devices’ initiatives, is accelerating the adoption of smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices in the workplace. Today’s dynamic and mobile workforce is now relying on personal devices in their professional lives and expect anytime, anywhere access to corporate systems – including printing.

As the office extends to an ever-wider range of work locations and businesses find themselves supporting a diverse range of mobile platforms, the print infrastructure is extending to the mobile worker, improving both employee and business productivity. Even in the era of smartphones and tablets, businesses continue to rely on printing. Quocirca’s research reveals that there is certainly the appetite for mobile printing, with almost 60% of respondents stating that their organisations would like to print from their mobile devices, with around 25% currently investigating mobile print solutions.

However, due to the diversity of mobile platforms and printer hardware, implementing an enterprise mobile print strategy is far from simple. Organisations face a complex array of hardware, software and service offerings, which vary both by mobile platform and printer device. Businesses cannot afford to ignore the consumerisaton impact on enterprise printing. If they do, consumers will bypass IT and potentially use consumer printer apps which offer IT no real levels of corporate security or control on what is printed.

Clearly, the future of enterprise printing will increasingly be shaped by consumer trends. The extent to which organisations and vendors can harness this trend will determine success or failure. Organisations must balance a mobile print strategy with security, cost, business process requirements, user needs and delivery models.

This report highlights the market drivers for mobile printing in the business environment, discusses some of the main offerings in the market and suggests some best practices for building a mobile print strategy.

Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District

SITUATION

• Previously used the traditional centralized model of printing bubble sheets, distributing them to each school, and then collecting and shipping them back to a central location for scanning.
• By the time bubble sheets were generated, shipped out, and reached teachers, new students often had entered the district and others may have moved to a different school
• Agreement was universal that the entire process of generating and handling student testing bubble-sheets was in need of an overhaul.

SOLUTION

• Lexmark installed a multifunction printer (MFP) that combines a business- class laser printer, copier, scanner, and fax machine into a single, fully networked compact unit.
• Lexmark was able to provide total integration with the district’s internal systems.
• Through the use of Lexmark management software, the district is now able to track paper and toner use at each device.

RESULTS

• 99% reduction in time for teachers to scan bubble sheets and receive results (from days to minutes)
• With 80 MFPs, teachers now print bubble sheets on demand
• Elimination of the expense grading distribution and collection expenses
• Elimination of delays associated with central site generation, distribution, and collection.

Lexmark International, Inc., is a $3.9 billion business providing companies in over 150 countries with a broad range of printing and imaging products, solutions and services that make their customers more productive.

While the company's competitors spend more, on a relative basis, on advertising and marketing, Lexmark has relied more heavily on customer advocacy to underscore its industry througth leadership and success in helping its customers achieve significant cost reductions and efficiency gains. In the new economic reality the importance of peer experiences and opinions as part of the buying cycle has increased significantly.

Lexmark lacked a formalized global reference tool to leverage all of its content in global opportunities. Additionally, there was recognition that an efficent global program could increase productivity by freeing up time for salespeople to sell.

The Challenge

Many tools, Incosistent practices

Lexmark had a marketing resource in each geography with partial responsibility for customer reference activities, each using different tools and processes to build customer reference content and fulfill customer requests. As an example, there was little consistency between a sucess story created in Canada and one create in Australia.

Reducing Print Related Costs in Large Organizations

Executive Summary
The following white paper outlines a strategy for organizations to create and implement a managed output strategy. While the advantages of reducing costs by printing with fewer devices is clear to most organizations, determining the best path to success has been less obvious.

The industry has confirmed a savings potential of 20–40 percent by migrating to a managed and consolidated environment. But if organizations are not careful, they can struggle to quantify these projections to the satisfaction of management. Furthermore, adoption by users is a requirement for reaching these goals.

The following steps outline a path that will help organizations avoid or address the common barriers
project teams face. There are five phases: