Fife Council is a large council, third biggest council in Scotland, and we’re on
an efficiency drive like everyone else.
Digital transformation is one of the key activities we want to look at, and managed print services
or printing across the council is a large opportunity to look at maybe making some efficiencies,
changing the way we work, look at digital transformation and basically save some money,
which we can then put into other services across the council.
So, one of the key drivers for us in doing that change was understanding what we did,
understanding what we spent on print and understanding how it could be better.
Carbon reduction is a big factor in that. Fife Council is the first council in the UK to
achieve the carbon reduction standard, which has been a process of this contract.
The other aspect for us is really day to day services.
How do we go about making it cheaper, more efficient without impacting on services, and
the benefits of the contract that we’ve had over the last ten years have enabled us
to divert money from printing – which nobody sees the benefit of – into front line services.
The main thing with this contract with Canon on sustainability objectives is to keep
improving year on year, and that’s actually set out in the contract.
Every year on year, we must see improvement coming in.
For example, one of the benefits from that is we were spending about £2.5million per
year on a managed print service when we started ten years ago, we’re now spending £1.25.
So, I’ve halved that cost in that space of time.
I’ve also halved the amount of pages that we print every year, so huge reductions in
paper costs.
That sustainability angle has been to the fore, but we recognise that sustainability
brings about efficiency as well, financially.
What we wanted to do, we created what we have here which is the Central Print Unit, which
is a print hub.
What we have here is dedicated staff who do all, so a variety of stuff gets done here.
Not just our high-volume print, there’s document scanning high volume and we’ve
a signed manufacturing shop.
We had near five and a half thousand desktop printers all over the council estate and we
looked at how that must be costing us money.
We corporately brought it altogether, so we controlled all the spend, stock controlled
all the print, but also a big part of that was to change the culture of the organisation.
We’ve reduced our spend on paper by 40% from the start.
Key in doing that has been working closely with Canon and developing a partnership arrangement
in which we both share the same goals in terms of service delivery.
Canon is a company at the forefront of everything that happens around digital print services
– scanning, managed print services.
It’s Canon that has been coming to us with digital mailroom solutions, with better scanning
options for services.
The scale of the project is significant.
We have approximately 150,000 service user files that are closed in our archives.
So, what we are looking at is any new cases that have become open to our social work servers,
we will be requesting that the paper- based file is scanned directly into SharePoint so
that would enable the user at the end of the operation, or member of staff or social worker
to access that information directly.
Any correspondence coming in by mail, we will be inputting that directly into the system
using our MFD Devices that have been configured.
We will also be looking at scanning paper files at the point of closure, so again, we
are reducing the storage costs within our offices, but also, we are digitising paper
records – so it’s a kind of two-way approach in terms of managing the size and the scale
of the project.
I think it was critical for us to have our client service manager from Canon based within
our team.
Now, on the project part when we were doing the roll-out, we were bringing in print policies
and engagement and communications and that type of thing, Alan acted as
a single point of contact for Fife Council, to Canon, for all things.
That worked extremely well in terms of the times on the project – they do things quickly,
get answers quickly and it was exceptionally good.
I think Fife is deemed as a centre of excellence in a number of areas because we’ve been
prepared to invest in areas and invest in technology in this case.
Fife is seen as quite forward thinking but to do that you have to do a lot of work upfront.
You’ve got to gain the confidence of individuals, you’ve got to gain the confidence to make
sure you can borrow that amount of money and sustain that delivery over a period of time.
Since the contract has been in place with Canon, we’ve had that continual improvement
and the confidence to just increase year on year.
We feel that, in terms of managed print services, we’ve cracked a lot of that.
We want to move onto the next stage and do a managed document service.
That will give us real opportunities to make further efficiencies and we can direct that
efficiency to the front-line services that exist across Fife.