Xerox India, a subsidiary of the $17.6 billion Xerox Corporation, realised that it needed to have a better control on its internal document output devices, optimise assets and thereby reduce costs.

There were a total of 75 devices that were deployed across its 14 branches in the country.

“Our document output environment was not isolated as a separate cost centre and it was difficult to calculate actual cost of ownership. Almost all asset deployment was uncontrolled, with inbuilt inefficiencies for cost and maintenance. There was no central management to control this distributed document output environment. Moreover, the devices deployed were getting old and were under the end of life state,” recalls Mark Pettit, Executive Director, Xerox Global Services (XGS), Xerox India.

Xerox understood that in the current economy it would face challenges on revenue and margins. So it was imperative for it to look for areas and opportunities to drive its cost base down, grow revenues and increase shareholder value.

The necessary element—self assessment

In order to have an effective solution and processes in place, the company decided to carry a thorough check on the current employees usage patterns, document volume and the costs involved.

“We did a scientific methodology of engagement process called as Office Document Assessment or ODA which uses a combination of lean tools and Six Sigma tools. We call it a Lean Six Sigma (LSS) methodology which defines a thorough understanding of the document usage within the organisation,” says Pettit.

A team was formed that comprised LSS Green and Black Belts who used tools to conduct document output assessment and established the existing baseline spends on documents. This assessment was carried out in a five-step process that included right-sizing the document output infrastructure, device standardisation and security, proactive support , improve business processes and their integration and finally continuous process improvement and monitoring.

Assessment provided fact-based detail on end user requirements, document jobs, sizes, output volumes and costs per device.

The results came as a shock for the Xerox India team. For the total 75 assets the device utilisation was 1.93 percent and the employee to device ratio was 8.6.The total annual document volume was 45,68,572 with 7028 pages per employee. The annual spend per employee was Rs 9,291 and the total document output cost annually was Rs 60.40 lakh.

The next step

Once the office environment baseline was established, the team decided to get together and develop a plan to maximise savings through right-sizing while delivering optimal operational efficiencies.

The company kicked off “Project Perfection” (the project name of the transformation process) and chose Xerox Office Services, which is a suite of services to manage document output and infrastructure assets to help deliver measurable efficiencies, reduce costs and improve productivity.

“This service leverages on taking a focused and holistic view of the entire office output management infrastructure and to provide opportunities to reduce costs and security risks, and improve operational efficiencies throughout our office,” informs Pettit.

The deployment of the services was carried out in various phases with proper control mechanisms and processes to measure the benefits from time to time. Analysis of critical to quality information helped the team to represent the product or service characteristics defined by customers, both internal as well as external.

“Our team also established design principles and integrated equipment to improve processes, conducted test runs to monitor and remove hurdles before the project went live,” says Pettit.

Post the deployment of the services, the team was able to achieve improved results. The total assets were reduced from 75 to 45 with device utilisation at 4.2 percent from the previous 1.93 percent. The employee to device ratio now stood at 15 as compared to 8.6 before the implementation.

In addition, the document volume decreased by 20 percent and total document output cost was now around Rs 47 lakh, a reduction of Rs 13 lakh from the previous state.

With the new system in place, employees no longer have to wait for queued printouts. Each employee has been provided with a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) badge which needs to be waved over the printer once a print command is given from the machine. The printer identifies the employee through the RFID badge and generates only the printout assigned for that particular employee. In addition, the printer sets a time within which the printout needs to be taken post which the document will be deleted from the printer.

“This has helped us to save time, reduce wastage of paper and also increase security efficiency within the organisation,” says Pettit.