Ster-Kinekor Entertainment slashes printing costs by R16k a month with Itec solution

Ster-Kinekor Entertainment, one of South Africa's leading distributors of games, consoles and DVDs, reports it has achieved a saving of R16 000 per month on its printing and copying bill, after appointing Itec Central as its office automation supplier and service provider.

This is despite an increase in monochrome and colour print volumes from 89 000 to 102 000 pages per month since the Primedia company commenced its partnership with Itec Central. Ster-Kinekor Entertainment, South Africa's official PlayStation distributor, reports that the partnership with Itec has also helped it to improve its productivity.

The company first started to look for a new printing and copying vendor after it ran into problems with the service levels it received from its previous service provider. “Our initial pain point was not cost, but the slow and unresponsive service we were receiving from our printing partner at the time,” says Andre Potgieter, Ster-Kinekor Entertainment's IT executive.

At the outset of the relationship, the priority for Ster-Kinekor Entertainment was to stabilise its print environment and bring uptime and services levels up to scratch, adds Potgieter. But the company's CFO also wanted to see financial savings accrue from the new contract with Itec.

Tyron Nakul, corporate portfolio manager at Itec Central, says Itec started out by analysing the Ster-Kinekor environment to identify opportunities to improve the stability of the environment and to save costs for the company.

There were immediate opportunities to save money while improving the performance of Ster-Kinekor's print environment by replacing a range of older products that were no longer supported by the manufacturer with more efficient multifunction products (MFPs).

But the real wins for Ster-Kinekor came from introducing Itec's value-added software solutions, Itec Sentry and Itec Print Director, to the company's MFP environment, says Chad Stuart, sales director at Itec Central. “We looked closely at the client's business requirements and crafted a solution to meet those needs,” he adds. “Much of the value in a print implementation today comes from the software and services rather than the hardware alone.”

Sentry is Itec's MFP management solution, which enables the entire device fault management process to be automated, greatly improving service levels. It allows MFPs to be managed in a proactive manner. Print Director, meanwhile, is an enterprise system that tracks, audits and controls all printing and photocopying on a network.

Says Potgieter: “Print Director alone has helped us to achieve significant cost savings by controlling the way that users print. For example, the product has a follow-me-printing feature, which forces users to release the print job at the printer before it will print. That has put an end to the wastage of users printing jobs that they never collect.

“Probably 30% of prints are deleted because no one releases them - an indication of how much wastage there was in the past,” Potgieter says.

Each printer features a card reader that is integrated with Ster-Kinekor's access control system. To release a print, users must authenticate themselves with their access cards, giving Ster-Kinekor Entertainment the ability to track employees' printing and copying.

Sentry, meanwhile, has been instrumental in jacking service up to the level that Ster-Kinekor demands. The software allows Itec to maintain and manage the devices in a proactive manner so that breakdowns are very rare. In the event that a breakdown does occur, Itec often knows before Ster-Kinekor Entertainment does and dispatches resources to fix the machine within four hours. Sentry even alerts the Itec helpdesk when toner in an MFP is running low.

Ster-Kinekor Entertainment has done cost reviews every six months since commencing the relationship with Itec, and has found that costs are declining even as print volumes rise, Potgieter says. One of the reasons for the cost-savings lies in the flexibility of Itec's pricing structure and contract.

Many printing companies charge penalties if your print volumes go above a certain threshold in the month, says Potgieter, meaning that costs can rise sharply in months where demand peaks. But Itec has been willing to structure a pricing model that takes dips and peaks in Ster-Kinekor's print volumes throughout the year into account.

Ster-Kinekor has also been able to use new, high-quality printers from Itec to print small runs of marketing collateral, allowing it to bring some of its printing in-house and save further money. The service issues of the past have been dispelled, which means Ster-Kinekor Entertainment's offices can run smoothly without any printing glitches disturbing productivity.