Issue #0434/1 - Not many of us want it but centralised printing or copying is capable of bringing economies of scale and expertise to hard copy that outweigh all the benefits of distributed print and copy.
In the 21st century, we all have a tendency to want everything we could desire to be immediately to hand or accessible rapidly and simply. One schools district in the US has completely reversed the way this mindset typically relates to copying and printing with the help of Xerox and has reaped significant benefits as a result.
Think of the reasons for the mammoth rise in popularity of some of the key products in the world today:
- mobile phones – we want other people to be instantly accessible to us by voice or text.
- MP3 players / iPod – we want our own personal choice of music wherever we go, ALL the time.
- fast food / pre-packaged dinners – we don’t want to wait around for food or spend time preparing food.
To a certain extent the same mentality has surrounded the use of printers over at least the last decade. There has been rapid growth in the sales of small personal devices, both laser and inkjet, not just because of the penetration into homes but also as individuals and managers in large companies desire the immediacy of print right at their desks. This is caused by a combination of the ‘status’ of having ‘their own’ printer, combined with the desire to avoid having to walk to a central machine and potentially wait for their print job as the machine processes and prints other people’s print jobs.
Small printers have appeared on desks all around the world, bought from budgets that avoid the printer or the purchasing decision falling into the clutches of IT departments.
When a consolidation exercise is implemented, individuals are prepared to battle long and hard to keep ‘their’ printer that they jealously guard close beside them as they work. A couple of years ago I was told of one company takeover situation where employees physically took their printer with them from one company to the next! The well organised and managed single-vendor asset register fell into total chaos as equipment from multiple vendors emerged in the workplace.
IT managers fear for their lives as they plan consolidation processes that will deprive users of their much-loved personal printers because they know the plan will be badly received in the office user environment. Indeed there are stories of IT managers instituting subversive strategies for blame in order to avoid a tirade of abuse by deprived users.
So, when the Clovis Unified Schools District in the US (California) proposed a plan that would take almost all copying out of the schools, and into a central reprographics facility, one wouldn’t imagine that the plan would be received warmly!
One would hardly expect even teachers to jump up and down with joy at this prospect despite the fact that schools are a totally different working environment to any other I can think of. Teachers are universally overstretched, expected to put the right materials on the desks of pupils, sometimes at a moment’s notice, and are always subject to changing circumstances that can mean a complete change of lesson plan or classroom supervision with little or no time to plan or prepare.
Yet, they are expected to use materials in class that are supplied by the educational publishers and exist in hard copy only, accompanied by a reproduction licence for school’s use.
One of the biggest problems with photocopying has always been the danger of ‘getting it wrong’ first time. Either the formatting goes wrong; the image is too light or dark; or the collation of multi-page documents goes awry or takes forever because of the numbers of pages and numbers of copies involved. I have seen copy logs where the columns not only include the user’s name and the number of successful copies made but also a column for the number of ‘gash’ or wasted copies. It is a genuine problem!
Teachers in particular cannot afford the time to go through these time-wasting processes and, besides which, they need to be in front of the class or doing productive preparation or marking tasks instead of playing around in front of a photocopier.
Schools approach the solution to the problem in different ways. Probably the most popular method is to employ a copier operator so that teachers submit their copy job to the reprographics department, waiting hours or even days for the job to be returned. Maybe the result is as the teacher wanted, maybe it is not. The teacher loses control.
Clovis Unified Schools District is one of 14,178 schools districts in the US, serving around 120,000 schools. It has 35,000 pupils and consumes 88 million sheets of paper per year as copy jobs. The district has long had a well-defined copy strategy, including operating a district-wide copier rental program from 1992 to 1997 and a district-wide cost per copy contract between 1997 and 2002.
However, when the cost per copy threatened to double after the contract ran out in 2002, and at a time when the economic climate for schools was at an all-time low, drastic action was called for.
Part of the solution was to implement a ScanBack procedure. This involved centralising the reprographics function for the entire schools district into one location.
Instead of the teacher walking to a copier in their school and preparing their teaching materials themselves, all they need to do is to scan the original using a Xerox MFP, providing instructions on the quantity and formatting, in very much the same manner as they would have done previously. However, instead of being printed immediately by that same MFP at a relatively high cost, that print job is automatically transmitted to the central reprographics facility where it is printed on a production level machine at a very much reduced cost, collated and delivered to the teacher in school the following day.
Yes, it means that the teacher has to plan the availability of lesson materials at least one day in advance.
But, Clovis Unified Schools District indicates that 500 ScanBack jobs are being submitted each day (Autumn 2004). With copy volumes having reached almost 75 million during the 2003/04 school year, cost per copy was only 1.44 cents.
Clearly this represents a very significant contract for Xerox. In fact, it represents nearly $1.1m in revenue over the school year, about the same as the district spent on text books.
However, the system has released teachers to focus more on educational issues rather than spending valuable time on copy functions. It has also allowed the district to manage, reduce and control costs more tightly, using an implementation of Equitrac, and enables the Clovis district to offer ScanBack and delivery services to schools in neighbouring districts – much appreciated revenue for Clovis.
Following the success of this scheme, it is anticipated that the solution is scalable for use in both larger and smaller schools districts and would be just as suited to other types of public sector organisations.
Part of the success of the scheme is that personal mindsets have been changed and individuals are happy to scan their jobs to a centralised location where previously they may have resented the time taken to ‘get the job right’ or even been possessive and reluctant to let the job go.
Whether the ScanBack system could be implemented in this way in schools in countries other than the US is certainly open to debate. Educational systems, funding and administration works very differently country to country. For instance, I would find it hard to imagine a centralised ScanBack scheme making any headway in the UK where schools hold their own budgets and competition between schools is high.
Centralising the provision of the entire hard copy function certainly is not the universal panacea for reducing costs and improving efficiency.
However, the principle remains – strategies need to be found whereby the processes used in all types of organisations may be modified in order to increase productivity and efficiency and to reduce wastage – both materials and time.
If this can be achieved, it will most definitely involve modifying habits, practices and customs in the workplace. Process changes may be the answer in some scenarios, involving consolidation of the hard copy function, while for others the answer may lie more in the implementation of print management systems and in changing those ingrained habits without ever the need for a complete hardware appraisal.
An example of reprogramming users’ habits arrived on my computer this week in the form of an email that had the following slogan at the bottom,
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