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Million pages monthly - Visteon - Autopal

Visteon – Autopal, s. r. o., is a member of the American Visteon Corporation. Visteon has over 170 branches in twenty-four countries throughout the world, manufacturing the car components for nineteen biggest car manufacturers. The turnover of Visteon is 17 billion dollars, employing 50,000 people. Autopal produces in its plants in Nový Jičín, Northern Moravia, car lights and other car components. Required information is attached to every product, putting Autopal on the mark of 550,000 A4 format pages monthly. About 10 percent of the printed pages are color prints. The company implemented own document administration system for document circulation, processing and archiving. Along with administration and other documents, Autopal prints about 900,000 pages monthly on over 300 printers.

Original status

The original solution used sixteen multifunction HP Mopier 240 printers, having printed over 18 million pages over the last three years. This solution became gradually inconvenient. The print distribution according to individual product became very inflexible and the supervision of who prints what and where became impossible. The printing costs started to become a heavy burden for the company’s budget. Purchase of new printers and other devices, their maintenance and operation would constitute a problem in the form of initial investment and increased upkeep.

  • More than 300 printers of different brands and types were used without proper administration.
  • Very little chance to organize the number of prints (several thousands of pages monthly).
  • Costs for paper and articles of consumption (toners, cartridges) were impossible to track.
  • Sending documents to the internal system for administration was problematic.
  • Users were limited by the speed of document processing and print speed.

Solution

  • Complete outsourcing of printing, copying and scan devices was implemented including SafeQ printing solution.
  • Several multifunction printing devices were purchased as a part of the outsourcing deal.
  • SafeQ printing monitoring and administration system was introduced.

Current status

All prints including the brochures and other product information were transferred to the external supplier service. Printing and printing devices monitoring has been introduced as a part of SafeQ printing solution, an original Czech software solution by Y Soft. SafeQ allows assigning and administration of user rights and monitor the prints of individual users, monitor who is printing what and where. Every user is assigned a set of user rights which defines the kind of documents he can print (black and white or color documents) but also defines what printers can be used by a specific user. The software can redirect to another printer should the queue of the chosen one be full.

Users must be authorized in order to use a printer. The authorization is carried out via card scanners at the devices. The scanners can identify user by the employee card that every employee owns.

The test run has already shown that print monitoring led to a thirty percent printing costs reduction. The local printers not directly included in the print of product documents are monitored too. Therefore the costs can be traced to the respective user level. SafeQ also supports detailed logging, saving all print jobs and saving their outlooks preventing the employees from printing private documents.

Requirements met

The Visteon – Autopal requirements for the printing solution – to improve the organization of the prints, the documents for products in particular, to simplify and accelerate the document processing and administration, to prevent significant wasting of financial resources for additional printing devices, paper and articles of consumption – were met. The reduction of printing costs was significant in a company where there are more than 2 printers per 100 employees.

The outsourcing of multifunction printing devices along with the SafeQ administration and monitoring software met the initial requirements. Conception, implementation and administration of printing and copying were transferred to an external supplier. The service is paid for in accordance with the clear and measurable parameters – the number of printed black and white and color pages for a specific user or project.

Benefits

  • Printing costs reduction by thirty percent.
  • Thorough administration, tracking and monitoring of prints.
  • Four-hour service is available as well as continuous upgrade of the printing solution.
  • Significant acceleration in document processing and administration.