Trust reportedly reduces printing costs by 30 percent since implementing Canon’s managed print services programme.
According to technology website Computing.co.uk, Lancashire Care NHS Foundation Trust (LCFT) has saved around £200,000 ($31,700/€23,700) through the use of MPS provided by Canon, which it selected after a tender process in 2010.
Explaining LCFT’s decision to select Canon, Dave Tomlinson, Director of Finance at the trust, said: “They had the best understanding of what we wanted to do, and understood the whole cost of the entire process which was important for us […] If you’ve got a piece of kit which could leave a whole load of people screwed if it fails, then the responsiveness and fault fixing, and ability to get the right equipment, which is heavy duty and stands up to wear and tear, is really important.”
The implementation of the MPS programme has been staggered over three years, across 130 of the trust’s sites, with Tomlinson explaining that this was to allow staff to “make the best use of technology and not create more issues than those that are being solved”. He also said that it was important to have “experts on the individual sites, putting all of the effort into training”.
In terms of challenges, Tomlinson said that there was sometimes a perceived “loss of control” following the change to MPS, as people “used to have their own printers, and now they’ve got to use the local printer, and they can’t print colour when they want […] if a multi-faceted device goes down, automatically people respond with ‘oh look at that’. You have to get behind it; the pros and benefits do outweigh the cons”.
Part of the MPS programme involves the implementation of automatic black and white, two-sided printing, reducing paper usage by 40 percent and colour output by 15 percent; while Tomlinson said that the key benefit of the programme to him is the ability for users to print from anywhere at any time: “It means that I can go to my nearest printer, log in and pull off all the prints I want there and then. So I could be working at home and do[ing] all of my work there, and then come in to the office and do a load of park printing.
“Clearly you have to manage this appropriately as there might already be a lot of documents printing from someone else but it means you’ve got better flexibility, far better controls of the consumables, and you can set the standards.”
The third phase of the MPS implementation is now being planned by LCFT, with the trust’s final 25 sites set to benefit from November.