Optimization and increased productivity Podravka d.d.Print management – case study

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Food company increased efficiency and productivity of its employees through a new print management system

Print management – case study

Podravka, a Croatian company with headquarters in Koprivnica, is one of the leading companies in Southeast, Central and Eastern Europe. Podravka’s food products are well known throughout Croatia and the company sells its products in 45 countries. Podravka is the largest food company in Croatia and one of the leading food companies in the region. It keeps up with the latest technologies and invests in the knowledge of its 6500 employees.

Situation Podravka has been using a print management system since 2008 and it was the first successful implementation of such system in Croatia. The system was used by 900 employees at eight locations and it made possible for them to increase printing efficiency together with the possibility to allocate costs transparently – which means a possibility of financial control and cost management. Coordinated with Podravka’s strategy, business processes and policies, the system fulfilled their expectations completely.

Four years later, the contract for the existing system ended and Podravka was interested in what the market had to offer. That’s why they published a request for proposals. Podravka had already used such a system, the technical requirements were very clear and concrete, and the result were continual situational analyses. The tender had two rounds and in the first round the bidders had to define all the details and present them to the Podravka IT department. Based on the price and acceptability of the offer, two bidders went to the second round – the company whose solution Podravka was using at the time and b.t.c d.o.o, a long-time Canon partner.

The b.t.c. offer, based on average print requirements and the number of users, consisted of 40 multifunctional Canon imageRUNNER ADVANCE 4025i and imageRUNNER C2225i printers in combination with the uniFLOW print management system.

The b.t.c. solution was tested on one multifunctional imageRUNNER C2225i

printer installed on the uniFLOW system and was compared to the competitor’s devices, while the technical specifications were of great importance.

The Canon uniFLOW system has SAP Gold partner status and that was an advantage in adapting to the printing requirements of the business-IT system with increased demands. “The most important thing is that we succeeded in adapting to all the kinds of prints from Podravka’s business-IT SAP system as well as customize the uniFLOW system according to their requirements in two weeks, unlike our competition who needed much more time”, said Ljubomir Tomasic, the b.t.c. CEO. “The implementation was also made easier by the ability to synchronize users of Active Directory service and uniFLOW system, which also was a significant advantage over our competition.”

“What we feared most was the integration with SAP because we had a lot of problems with that in our first implementation, but it was relatively painless this time”, said Dubravko Kopjar, the system network and user support manager in Podravka.

“We were satisfied with the current partner and it was in our interest not change the partner so we didn’t have to move to another solution”, said Goran Medurecan, IT manager in Podravka. “But b.t.c. had the best proposal. We asked around about the solution and received Canon’s guarantee that they would back their partner. After the successful testing, the decision was not difficult.”

Solution After b.t.c. was chosen, they signed a four-year contract and implemented everything in a month. They installed the 40 devices from their proposal, 24 imageRUNNER ADVANCE 4025i B&W printers and 16 imageRUNNER ADVANCE C2225i colour printers. The printers were connected to the uniFLOW system with additional modules for print security and consumption monitoring. Six more imageRUNNER ADVANCE C2225i printers were installed at various external locations – they were not connected to the uniFLOW system and the eMaintenance system was

used for their maintenance instead. The uniFLOW portal with monitoring the status of all devices made it easier to monitor and control the print portfolio. A service technician, an employee of b.t.c, is present at Podravka during business hours in order to provide technical support at location. The technician takes care of the printing infrastructure, monitors the printers and provides support for the users.

b.t.c. organized seminars before the implementation in order to introduce the Podravka employees to the new system. There were no big difficulties because the employees knew a similar system. The users were satisfied that there were no big differences and that the new solution wouldn’t change the way they worked but make their work faster and simpler.

“We had an additional requirement, to

The installation consisted of 24 imageRUNNER ADVANCE 4025i B&W printers and 16 imageRUNNER ADVANCE C2225i colour printers. The printers were connected to the uniFLOW system with additional modules for print security and consumption monitoring.

The user support department estimates that the colour printing became faster by 60-70% on the Canon devices as compared to the previous solution, and adding new users is both faster and easier because the users can do almost everything themselves through the authorization on the device. Another indispensable tools is Canon Remote Operation Viewer, which offers quick help to technicians who can establish a remote connection to users’ computers and help them about printing.

Data security is important in every company and that’s why the authorization of users is done through the cards they use to enter the building. The printers are fitted with Micard Plus card readers, which can read 35 different kinds of cards. “We allow authorization by six-character PIN at the moment and so avoid the possibility that anybody can see other user’s prints by entering a wrong PIN,” Ksenija Godek added.

Podravka also uses print forwarding to all the printers and the employees don’t have to worry on which device they will pick up their printed documents. The employees use all the functions of the multifunctional printers – printing, copying, scanning and faxing. Documents are printed on one and both sides of paper, as users wish or require. Black and white printing is standard and colour printing is not limited.

With Canon’s solution, Podravka has increased both the efficiency and productivity of its employees, and the new abilities and the reliability of the system make their business even better.

“We are very satisfied with the solution. b.t.c. has done an excellent job, their proactivity was exceptional and we made our planned savings,” said Medurecan.

monitor paper consumption by sizes and positions because of cost allocation and transparency”, said Ksenija Godek, head of the user support department. It’s a separate module which is not a part of the uniFLOW system and b.t.c. developed it themselves. “Cost per click for A3 and A4 papers is not the same and the amount is automatically entered into the books on the basis of a monthly report sent by b.t.c. SAP software then adds up employees by cost position and charges the cost position.”

Modular statistics reports, customizable according to user requirements, turned out to be essential for the accuracy of accounting and print cost allocation per employee. “We print 200,000 B&W pages and 40,000 colour pages every month in Podravka, and that’s why an efficient solution for accurate cost monitoring was necessary”, added Ksenija Godek. Printing represents 85% of the printed documents while 15% is copying. 95% of the documents are printed on A4 paper and only the employees in the marketing, design, and engineering departments use A3 paper.

Benefits The system is primarily intended for employees and that’s why the advantages of Canon’s system were well accepted.

With such a great number of employees, the support has to be efficient, and that’s why Universal Printer Driver – a unified control program for all devices – is an advantage which simplifies the installation on individual devices through a script. “A novelty, which we thought quite practical, was the ability to change settings before printing on the printer itself, even if you forgot them after sending the document to printing from your computer,” said Ksenija Godek. “Beside printing, the most used option is Scan-to-myself, which mails the scanned document to the user with one click.”

Print management – case study

The system is primarily intended for employees and that’s why the advantages of Canon’s solution were well accepted. The user support department estimates that the colour printing became faster by 60-70% on the Canon devices as compared to the previous solution, and adding new users is both faster and easier because the users can do almost everything themselves through the authorization on the device.

»We are very satisfied with the solution. b.t.c. has done an excellent job, their proactivity was exceptional and we made our planned savings.«Goran Medurecan, IT manager in Podravka

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