Ops success story maelardalen university sweden

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Success Story

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Optimized Print Services Success Story Company Profile: Mälardalen University, Sweden Mälardalen University (MDH) in Eskilstuna and Västerås is one of Sweden’s largest tertiary institutions with 13,000 students and 1,000 employees. A couple of years ago, MDH introduced its centralised printout service. It was a large and complex project, offering huge potential for rationalisation and improvement of user services.

Customer’s current situation/challenge MDH’s old printer environment was out of date and had run unreliably. It had many faults, which resulted in students and staff alike experiencing poor service. The maintenance costs were high, and the information technology (IT) department spent a lot of time and effort on things that had gone wrong. The machinery previously consisted of a total of 134 printer units, with 6 different brands and 47 different models. MDH had to deal with several contracting parties and with many different agreements. There were no fixed service days and no automatic and direct fault reporting to the contractor. Furthermore, MDH had no effective means of administering and monitoring the system. The existence of many different operating routines was another problem. Replacing toner cartridges and resupplying paper also required a lot of MDH resources. Previously, employees and students only had access to specific printers. Cash handling when paying for printouts and the expensive and time-consuming handling of about 60 suppliers’ invoices were among the other problems.

Success summary To solve the problems of the old printer environment, MDH introduced its centralised printout service, known as Printo, incorporating new, energy-saving, multifunctional printers. Koneo* and Konica Minolta where chosen as the contractors. The current machinery consists of a total of 99 units, which serve both staff and students. There is a fixed price per copy/printout, which includes servicing, repairs, and refills of toner and paper. Some of the significant improvements that were achieved with this project are centralised and modern monitoring and administrative systems and automatic and direct fault reporting from the machine to Konica Minolta/Koneo, or follow-me printing.

Success Story Optimized Print Services

Konica Minolta, Optimized Print Services

Optimized Print Services OPS has three phases of implementation. The first one is OPS consult, where Konica Minolta analyses and identifies the customer’s environment and needs to then propose the best solution.

OPS Consult is followed by OPS Implement and OPS Manage.

OPS Consult The Consult phase started with a workshop together with stakeholders from MDH. During this workshop, outlines of the analysis and goals for the new solution were created. Data about the current situation were collected, using software for tracking the printers and the number of printed pages. Additionally, an on-site visit was done to collect information about configurations and floor plans. Costs and other problems were analysed by interviews and by using statistics provided by MDH. Based on the result of the analysis, Konica Minolta/Koneo’s knowledge, and MDH’s wishes, an optimisation proposal was created.

In the new solution, the number of machines was reduced from 134 to 99. Follow-me was introduced to give students choices like A3 size paper and colour printing, as well as scanning, and at the same time to create a redundant system where students and employees did not have to rely on any single device. Tools for monitoring and administration were introduced, together with a PayEx system to handle payment from students using the machines.

OPS Implement Implementation of the new solution contained three steps. Step one was a test installation in a LAB environment. Software and hardware were tested, together with MDH’s systems, as a proof of concept. In a second step, a pilot installation was made and over five weeks, 1,000 students and 40 employees evaluated the solution from a user perspective. After this, the complete rollout and installation were accomplished over three months, including the education of the users in how to use the new solution. Information events, together with web-based materials, were used for this purpose. The whole implementation project was led by a project manager from Konica Minolta/Koneo, working closely with the project team from MDH.

OPS Manage OPS Monitor is used by Konica Minolta/Koneo to collect alarms and informations from machines and to trigger services such as refill of toner and paper. OPS Monitor also gives Konica Minolta/Koneo the opportunity to provide proactive service to avoid unnecessary downtime on machines. A shared case-management system is used to track Service Level Agreement (SLA) fulfilment and to create a transparent environment. There are regular meetings between Konica Minolta/Koneo and MDH to continuously evaluate the delivered solution and to find possible areas of improvement.

OPS Customer’s comment “Today we only have to deal with a single contracting party, a single brand, a single agreement and a single invoice”, says Hossein Azdanlou, Project Manager for the centralised printout service at MDH. “But the most important thing is that we have achieved major improvements for our users. The students are no longer tied to a specific printer from a certain computer room – they are now able to issue print commands from their own private computers via the wireless network to our modern multifunction printers. These are able to deal with colour printing, A3 format, copying and scanning in colour direct to the home directory”, continues Hossein Azdanlou.

Konica Minolta Business Solutions Europe GmbH Europaallee 17 • 30855 Langenhagen • Germany • Tel.: +49 (0) 511 74 04-0 • Fax: +49 (0) 511 74 10 50 • www.konicaminolta.eu

01/2013

* Koneo is a 100% Konica Minolta -owned company for office and information technology (IT) services.