PRINT MANAGEMENT
Giving NHS print management direction
Your print budget – a painless place to save?
I Sarah Armitage
Sarah Armitage, corporate marketing and communications manager at NHS Direct, tells National Health Executive about their print management arrangements
W
hat led to NHS Direct deciding that it needed to outsource its
print management?
NHS Direct used a number of different suppliers for services such as design, print, storage, telephone ordering, fulfilment and delivery. We decided to rationalise the number of different suppliers we used to streamline our processes and ran a competitive tender to select a single supplier who could provide all these services.
What kind of arrangement are you involved in?
AccessPlus was appointed in 2009 to supply our design, print, storage, orderline (telephone and web-based), fulfillment, promotional items and portable exhibition equipment.
What are the benefits of that arrangement?
Managing a single supplier rather than multiple ones is simpler and saves time and money. AccessPlus are able to manage the end-to-end process, from designing an item,
Jul/Aug 10
printing it, delivering it to their warehouse, adding it to our stock list, through to packing and despatching it when it’s ordered.
They’ve enabled us to offer online and telephone ordering for our promotional materials, which is proving popular, especially with other NHS organisations.
They’ve also been able to provide us with a digital asset management system, so that we can store all our digital artwork and photography in a central place, with secure access via the web.
What kind of efficiencies is this arrangement achieving?
We have already realised cost savings on design and print services. For example, online ordering of our promotional items is far more cost effective than telephone ordering.
Just as importantly, AccessPlus have delivered wider
improvements in terms of the speed, quality and consistency of our printed output.
t may be a surprise to learn that a hospital’s document printing and copying budget offers a great opportunity to reduce expenditure – almost painlessly. It is a budget often overlooked as being ‘necessary spend’ which couldn’t realize major savings. However with the new government demands for significant spending reductions, every cost-saving opportunity should be explored.
It is estimated that with improved control of printing and copying, most large organisations can make big cost reductions in this area. For an average NHS trust this could be an astounding £1M or more over the next five years. More surprising still is that this can be achieved with almost no disruption and with minimal pain.
These savings can be achieved by installing a good print and copy management solution. This ensures a document is only printed when a user has confirmed they really need it and they are ready to receive it. This gives added security for sensitive documents, ensuring they never end up in the wrong hands.
The software also provides an audit trail, allowing costs to be recovered internally.
Almost certainly, you will at some time have sent a document to print and arrived at the department’s printer to find a mass of disorganised printed papers and no evidence of the document you just requested.
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Typically, someone faced with this then reprints the document.
Clearly this is a waste of paper, ink and time. Using print management software avoids this waste. Plus there is a hidden bonus: cutting waste, cuts your carbon footprint.
“Our clients are amazed at how quickly they recoup their initial costs – one client reported 2 million printed sheets fewer in the first year on one site alone”, says Alan Christie of ICS Ltd, developers of the leading print & copy management solution, XPR Enterprise.
So why aren’t more hospitals making the switch? Many organisations simply don’t know there is an easy-to-install solution available. Sometimes procurement responsibility falls between several departments, making the decision-making process more difficult, but organisations which overcome this and make the change achieve big savings.
A hospital’s print budget offers painless and easy savings. A must-do for 2010.
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