Time prints money for law firm

Cornerstone’s Rod Hogrefe knows a lot about printers and managed services. A one-time employee of Lexmark Australia, Epson and Oki, in 1995 he co-founded Upstream, a print specialist reseller which now claims to be the largest independent in Australia.

Lexmark later bought the managed services business from Upstream and Hogrefe travelled back to his alma mater to oversee the operation.

Then he struck out again in 2002 with the launch of Cornerstone, a reseller that specifically chases the managed print services market.

In 2003 Gilbert + Tobin Lawyers, a firm of 250 lawyers and 350 staff based in Sydney, began using Cornerstone as its hardware service provider.

Hogrefe says he began discussing managed services from the very start and in particular impressed three propositions; reducing the hard cost of output, improving productivity and work satisfaction, and improving print process practices.

Cornerstone guarantees its SLAs, in some cases financially, and Hogrefe believes this is a great reassurance to customers considering the next step.

Soon after employing Cornerstone, the legal firm requested a major review of its printing procedures to reduce the amount of downtime, which was damaging staff morale.

Cornerstone used Lexmark’s Markvision software to analyse usage patterns, job stats and page counts on every device.

The data was entered into a custom application and run past the reseller’s established benchmarks to discover weaknesses and extract trends.

The reseller also interviewed 20 percent of the user base and asked what worked and what didn’t in their print environment.

Complaints centred on issues like downtime, normally from overworked machines requiring servicing, and changing paper for different tasks such as receiving faxes. “They were printing high-volumes of documents on a fairly small fleet of devices,” some of which were aged, says Hogrefe.

The reseller produced two reports, the first a quantitative assessment that revealed that many printers were over-utilised.

As a result staff were spending a lot of time waiting for jobs that sometimes became mixed up – a serious problem with legal documents that could run over 100 pages.

The second report examined qualitative data highlighting issues that affected productivity. The final report included a nine-recommendation summary that Cornerstone presented to Gilbert + Tobin’s executive team, and which the reseller then implemented in full 18 months ago. The end result was surprising. Gilbert + Tobin greatly increased the number of devices, from 45 to 60.

The legal firm “was the reverse of what we normally find,” says Hogrefe. Cornerstone generally finds that large organisations operate a disparate fleet that can be rationalised by up to 40 percent.

While the company had sensibly used the sharing philosophy, says Hogrefe, the standard norms of sharing one printer with 10 people was not viable. Like many law firms Cornerstone has worked with, Gilbert + Tobin has an extremely high output of paper – around 20,000 pages per month per device – and printers couldn’t maintain fast enough throughputs. “It’s a bit like telephone theory,” says Hogrefe.

“You don’t need a line for every person but there is an optimum number.”

Printers were placed according to user need rather than randomly throughout the floor. Previously printers were allocated by headcount, says Gilbert + Tobin CIO Mike Solomons, at roughly one printer for 10 staff, regardless of their requirements.

This unscientific method led to some printers working overtime and requiring constant maintenance for paper, toner and parts, while others were sitting under-utilised in a quiet corner of a floor.

Now each printer is flanked by another two. If one printer goes down, its six users are divided between the other two, which are both robust enough to handle the extra demand.

Two semi-retired printers are kept on trolleys as emergency stand-bys to replace printers temporarily out of action.

Cornerstone wheels in these “hot swappable” printers and matches them to the same IP address as the original printers, “and in a relatively short space of time we have a working printer back in place for the end user,” says Solomons.

Cornerstone’s hardware-backup idea doesn’t cost the legal firm any more money as it uses old, hand-me-down machines, so no additional purchases were needed.

Directly connected devices were all replaced with network-enabled machines, apart from two inkjets that were needed for specific applications. Moving to network devices that can be easily tracked was as much for management than performance. “It’s very, very difficult to run an efficient managed services if there are lots of USB connect devices,” says Hogrefe.

In the corporate world where status is carefully marked, the allocation of office perks can sometimes blow up into minor conflicts. “It’s amazing, people get very emotionally attached to their printer,” says Hogrefe. “We believe that the reason is that users inherently understand that it impacts their productivity.”

The most common ploy is for executives to demand their own printers on the grounds that their documents are confidential.

Hogrefe’s response is to recommend a printer with confidential print capacity, where a printer will hold a job in its memory and print it out only after a pin number is entered on the device’s numberpad.

Another technology that provides “pseudo security” are mailboxes.

Mailboxes sit in a stack of up to 10 on top of a printer, which sends each job to the appropriate user’s mailbox. The stack is generally labelled before it is deployed, with drivers already matched to the corresponding bins.

Although there are no lids on the mailboxes, still “it takes a pretty brave person to go rifling through someone else’s mailbox,” says Hogrefe. Employees can print to their mailbox and collect it hours later instead of racing to the printer before it becomes merged with subsequent jobs.

Cornerstone also uses a tactical approach to defuse workplace standoffs. Each review produces a matrix of user types against the type of products required, and in any dispute the reseller can refer to the matrix to make decisions.

The litigation group, for example, produces a small number of extremely high-volume jobs, and therefore requires a high-speed printer with a high-capacity output feeder and four paper input trays.

“It helps take all the emotion out of, ‘you’ve got one, I’ve got one’,” says Hogrefe.

Cornerstone did provide a blueprint to the law firm, which stuck to the recommendations and made the job a pleasure. “They were very disciplined and there was very little politics that I could sense,” says Hogrefe.