North Devon District Council – minimising costs and reducing waste

Over 25% savings were made

Established in 1974, North Devon District Council is a local authority responsible for delivering a wide variety of services including Council Tax collections, housing and planning applications. 

The Council is focused on meeting the needs of both local businesses and citizens, with a duty to ensure all money is well spent and offers great value for the taxpayer, despite financial restrictions. 

North Devonshire has a population of 94,600 and the Council has just over 400 employees, spread over a number of different sites.

The requirement

The Council has a duty to ensure sustainable and environmentally friendly operations.One of the areas with the highest maintenance costs and a significant environmental footprint was its printer network.

The Council reviewed its print offer and identified a need to rationalise the entire estate, as it owned numerous desktop printers that required frequent toner replacements. 

This was expensive and time-consuming. Each device needed regular maintenance and repairs to diagnose faults and remove paper jams, which not only added extra IT support costs to the Council’s overall expenditure but wasted a significant amount of paper, ink and energy, negatively impacting the Council’s environmental credentials. 

The solution 

After the initial evaluation, all printers and associated devices were decommissioned, and the Council invested in a new fleet of Kyocera Multi-Functional Devices (MFDs), saving a significant amount of money while simultaneously allowing visibility on printer usage. Over the course of the initial contract, the Council decommissioned various sites and consolidated its staff into fewer buildings, which enabled it to reduce the number of MFDs required. 

When that contract was due for renewal, the Council carried out due diligence by talking to other suppliers and comparing different products and services to determine other available solutions. Using Crown Commercial Service’s RM3781 framework for the tender process, the Council carried out a thorough evaluation of a number of potential suppliers on cost and quality. After comparing a range of different companies, the Council selected Kyocera, the Managed Services Provider, as the winning supplier and the contract was signed in October 2017.

Having run a full assessment of the existing printer setup to identify inefficiencies, Kyocera developed a required solution. It upgraded the existing Kyocera MFDs to faster machines, with proximity card readers for additional security, monitoring and data analysis, as well as ‘follow me’ print software. This enabled the Council to monitor all printing activity, deleting unclaimed prints to ensure minimal wastage, as well as ensuring that staff only print the documents they need. 

The entire solution is backed up by Kyocera’s industry-leading service level agreement (SLA), which offers a four-hour response time, guaranteeing exceptional customer support with minimal device downtime if there was an issue. 

Nina Lake, Business Information Systems Manager for North Devon said: “We were delighted with the level of service that Kyocera provided throughout the process. The team managed the decommissioning of our existing fleet of MFDs and rollout of the new devices seamlessly. The implementation was superb, the lead engineer was present at all sites during the roll out, even rolling up his sleeves to help out with the installation on a couple of occasions. We could not have been more pleased with how smooth the whole process was, and were delighted with the level of stakeholder management that Kyocera provided.” 

The solution was implemented quickly to ensure the council maintained continuity of service and the entire system was delivered exactly as specified in the Project Initiation Document and Plan. This ensured all machines were delivered, installed, configured and ready for use with virtually no disruption to the service.

The results 

The project has seen Kyocera consolidate all existing MFDs by introducing centrally managed printers running on powerful print management software, which reduces the print load, minimises costs and ensures wastage is kept to a minimum. 

Kyocera’s solution has also enabled North Devon Council to achieve a significant reduction in its rental budget, as this contract saved the local authority over 25% on the previous contract.

Nina Lake explained: “When the system first went live, there were a couple of early teething problems as you would expect, but these were dealt with very quickly and efficiently by the Kyocera support team. Now all the machines, devices and services are running effectively, and I very much look forward to working closely with our Account Manager to see if any further efficiencies and savings can be identified. I am sure there will be future opportunities to expand this relationship, as Kyocera continue to develop their range of products and services.”

For further information

View our webpage for guidance and more information on RM3781

Get in contact info@crowncommercial.gov.uk

Helpdesk: 0345 410 2222