One client who has benefited hugely from our print solutions is County Linen. A family-run company, County Linen have been delivering laundry services across London and the South East for over 100 years. The business provides services to businesses of all sizes, from small owner-operators to multinational groups of hotels, restaurants, and processing plants.
One area that County Linen has been committed to ever since its foundation a century ago is on improving their environmental performance. This continuous drive towards a more sustainable model led them to seek us out at EBM Managed Services, with a requirement to minimise print costs, improve efficiency and reduce overall waste.
When first getting in touch, the printing expenses at County Linen were excessively high. They were regularly experiencing issues with older machines that required maintenance, and it was costing them both time and money. The biggest challenge was anticipated to be the reduction of toner consumption and general wastage.
Equally, the company had a number of high consumption devices running, such as desktop printers, a copier, and scanners to name but a few, and all were situated in different areas of the business. This made the whole system highly inefficient, with users having to travel between offices to utilise different machines.
There was also a lack of an effective print management system to track the quantity printed each month. As they were unable to account for the amount of toner used, they stockpiled instead, leading to an unnecessary impact on their cash flow.
The first steps we took towards solving these problems was to perform a print audit of the company as a whole, to calculate accurately the toner consumption and the monthly printing cost. We also took into account the general running costs of the existing machines, which was £8,500 per year. To this, we added the cost of maintenance, as well as factored in the wasted time for employees having to travel across the office and back.
Once these figures were established, we then provided three high-performance Lexmark mono multifunction printers, all of which are low on energy consumption and offer a low cost per print. We made the necessary functions available locally to each user and immediately reduced huge amounts of wasted time and money.
By supplying multiple machines from one manufacturer, County Linen was able to focus on stocking a single type of toner. This allowed the print audit to accurately project how much toner was required in advance.
With these various aspects implemented, County Linen’s print costs could drastically reduce. After spending £8,496.36 in 2010, they are now spending just £4,196.43. This is despite increasing the number of devices from three to nine as well. Overall, the total saving will be £20,000 over 5 years. In addition to this, County Linen has increased productivity and improved eco-efficiency, something that has always been very important to them.
We will be presenting our County Linen case study in more detail, along with several other successful solutions we have provided, at our Launch Event on the 8th of July. This event will not only give us the chance to exhibit our new office and showroom space but also give local businesses an opportunity to see how our solutions have benefited others. Throughout the day, there will be talks, presentations and the opportunity to network. We look forward to seeing everyone on the day, and for more information about either our County Linen solution, or the Launch Event, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.