Customer Success Story Lincoln County Managed Print Services

The Situation
“No coordination” is the best way to describe Lincoln County’s old approach to
managing its printers and copiers. Many of the County’s 28 departments did their own
thing – they worked with diff erent vendors, secured diff erent equipment, and ordered
and warehoused their own supplies.

The result was astonishing – spread throughout the County were:
• 170 printers – of these there were 54 different models using more than 54 diff erent cartridges. The average printing speed was 15.181 prints per minute (ppm) and only 50 percent of the printers were on the network.
• Of the printers deployed, a sizeable number were color ink jet printers printing color at high cost.
• 30 copiers – 24 different models all using different toner cartridges.
• 18 fax machines – 15 different models all using different toners.

The situation could best be described as chaos, both from a purchasing perspective as well as for the IT department that would often be called upon to fi x problems. With a department of only three full-time technical people and one part-time, it was a challenge for IT not only to provide the service when needed but the expertise on the many diff erent models.

Understanding true costs was impossible. “There wasn’t any individual accountability for printing,” Don Schlising, IT Director for Lincoln County, said. “We had no way to know what the individual County departments were actually printing so no way to track costs. And, because they just ordered the equipment they thought they needed, we had no idea what their printing needs were and if they had the right equipment to meet those needs.”

Waste of stocked supplies when equipment was replaced was also a problem. With so many diff erent models, quite often when a machine was replaced its stocked supplies were unusable.