Driving Sustainability

The Royal Automotive Club in Western Australia (RAC in WA) provides its members with services in motoring, insurance, travel and finance. The organisation has over 700,000 members and positions itself as the independent voice for Western Australian road users. The range of services offered to the community include driving instruction, road side assistance and identifying the safety improvements needed on Western Australian roads through research and community support.

RAC in WA is committed to being an environmentally sustainable corporate citizen, working with the community to protect the natural environment and At a glance mitigate the risks of climate change. This includes working with government, the industry and its members to reduce the organisation’s environmental impact.

With 130 carbon neutral road patrol vehicles, RAC in WA has offset its emissions produced by its motoring fleet since 2002. The organisation designed its head office with the environment in mind and was subsequently awarded a four-star NABERS Energy for Offices building rating. RAC in WA’s commitment to sustainability extends to energy efficiency and the reduction of waste right across the business, including its print environment.

Issue

RAC in WA was looking to upgrade its print environment as the printer fleet lease was coming to an end. In assessing new print solutions, RAC in WA wanted to incorporate the higher levels of efficiency that technological advances have made possible since implementing the previous solution.

“We wanted to gain efficiencies in our print environment in three key areas: cost savings, productivity gains and in reducing our environmental impact,” said John Gilmore, Lead Project Manager, Shared Services Projects, RAC in WA.

The first priority was to reduce its printing costs by at least 15 per cent. The second involved applying transparency in printing costs to be able to accurately track actual costs back to its departments. Finally, the RAC in WA wanted to reduce the number of printers in its fleet through smarter networking and management, all without impacting business productivity.

As a sustainable corporate citizen, RAC in WA also used the opportunity to improve on its environmental footprint when upgrading its print solution. The main criteria for measuring environmental benefits of the new print solution included improving on its existing energy consumption levels, reducing paper wastage and ensuring all consumables are recyclable.

Implementation

After carrying out a detailed audit of the printing environment, Canon designed a customised print and document management solution based on the RAC in WA’s requirements.

Following three weeks of pre-testing, the audit revealed that by consolidating the print environment and implementing print management software RAC in WA would be able to meet its cost, productivity and environmental objectives.

After assessing our print environment, Canon recommended a solution that would save us up to 40 per cent on printing costs over the life of the contract. That equated to an average saving of around $20,000 per month, which was quite a convincing offer.

Across head office and contact centres,RAC in WA had in excess of 90 printers. “By lowering the total number of printers to around 40 we were able to significantly reduce our energy consumption and overall cost without impacting business productivity,” said John.

To ensure the RAC in WA achieved its objective to reduce printing costs and environmental impact, Canon implemented uniFLOW across its print fleet using the secure print, statistics and rules based routing modules.

With the uniFLOW rules-based printing module, the RAC in WA was able to implement default settings like duplex printing that would reduce printing consumable costs and paper wastage.

Prior to implementing uniFLOW’s rulesbased printing module, employees would have to physically change the printer settings to print double sided which was often overlooked in the bustle of everyday tasks. We found ourselves frequently running awareness campaigns in an attempt to reduce our environmental impact, but staff would remember to change print settings immediately after a campaign, but this behaviour would inevitably switch back to single sided print over time.

To avoid unnecessary printing,Canon implemented uniFLOW secure print solution. This required the employee to be standing at the printer before the print request is released.

“Our commitment to being an environmentally sustainable corporate citizen sees us continually striving to improve our own operations to reduce our impact on the environment and the printing behaviour of our employees is integral to this. To avoid any resistance to changefrom staff we needed a clear demonstration to highlight the benefits. With Canon’s assistance, we chose to collect all unclaimed documents from printers around the office and gather them over a normal working week.

“The stack we gathered provided a great visual, highlighting the positive environmental impact to be gained by implementing Canon’s uniFLOW secure print module. It also mitigated any possible resistance to the need for a swipe card to release a print job or the need to walk slightly further to a device due to the reduction in the print fleet.”

Canon’s uniFLOW module makes it easy for us to reduce our environmental foot print in our everyday busy roles which in turn created a real behavioural change among staff as they not only understood the environmental impact but also the cost of printing which uniFLOW secure print displays beside each print job.

To improve visibility of tracking print costs, uniFLOW statistics module allowed the RAC in WA to accurately attribute printing costs to each department instead of assigning a set cost.

The deployment took around six weeks and the benefits of consolidating the print fleet and implementing print management software soon followed.

Results

“The first three months of reporting indicated that we were already ahead of our cost savings target. We are well on track to meet and possibly exceed the overall anticipated savings objective.”

The RAC in WA was able to quickly achieve results on the environmental objectives set out for the upgraded printing solution. Initial reports revealed that the Canon solution had enabled the RAC in WA to make a significant reduction in paper wastage from unclaimed print jobs which was evident in the reduction in paper usage.

Within the first month of implementation, we saved 390,000 pages, which is 790 reams of paper or the equivalent of saving 20 trees just by implementing uniFLOW print management software. – John Gilmore

Further contributing to a reduction in paper usage, uniFLOW’s rules based printing enabled RAC in WA to implement a default setting to double sided printing.

Canon’s print solution allowed RAC in WA to not only gain an accurate view of printing costs across the business, but drive these down by changing employee print behaviour with uniFLOW’s rules based printing software.

uniFLOW’s rules based printing saw the number of duplex printing rise from 70,000 to 193,000 after implementation. Staff no longer have to spend time physically changing the settings or run awareness campaigns about paper wastage, leaving them more time to get on with their job.

“By reducing the number of printers and upgrading to more efficient devices, we significantly reduced our energy consumption and associated costs,” said John.

The implementation further revealed a behavioural change in the printing habits of the organisation’s staff.

“Canon’s uniFLOW print management software also caused a positive behavioural change in staff printing which saw 200,000 unwanted print jobs deleted from the system and not sitting wasted by the printer,” said John.

Finally, while the upfront costs of the Canon solution initially appeared to be costly following implementation, the RAC in WA was able to realise long term cost benefits, above and beyond the 40 percent reduction in printing costs with the overall cost saving of the print fleet coming under the monthly lease costs.