For the third time in a row

The town of Idar-Oberstein, with a population of around 30,000, is located in the heart of Rhineland-Palatinate in south-west Germany. Idar-Oberstein is internationally renowned for its global jewelry and gemstone industry. Its more than 500-year tradition, once founded on the mining of agate and rock crystal deposits in the region, is closely linked to the history of the "gemstone and jewelry town". As a local authority, the city administration is responsible for a wide range of tasks in the area of municipal services of general interest. This concerns the most diverse areas of citizens' lives, be it education and training, social and cultural affairs, housing and construction, public safety and order or tourism and business development. The city of Idar-Oberstein has a total of around 570 employees who are available to citizens as competent contacts. The city administration is a modern service provider, headed by the Lord Mayor. He represents the town and heads the administration. He is assisted by the mayor, who heads his own department. The self-governing tasks of the municipality are carried out by the 40-member city council, which is elected by the citizens every five years. www.idar-oberstein.de

Added value for the customer

Management Summary

Reducing the number of output devices by consolidating the printer fleet offers considerable savings potential. At the same time, however, the risk increases that the failure of a device could affect many employees and interrupt important business processes. This is why the city of Idar-Oberstein is relying on the support of IT-HAUS GmbH for the third time in a row. As a full-service provider, it not only supplies the devices but also provides a comprehensive repair and maintenance service. In this way, the managed print solutions from IT-HAUS GmbH help the customer not only to reduce consumables, but also to optimize all paper-based processes and thus relieve their IT team.

Starting position

The IT department of the Idar-Oberstein municipal administration is responsible for providing and maintaining (administration/system support) the necessary municipal IT infrastructure, including all branch offices. This includes schools, daycare centers, tourism and fire stations. It is responsible for data backup and user support. In addition to procuring new hardware and software and managing the IT system, the IT department is also responsible for the city's telecommunications support (Voice over IP). While the city administration's original printer fleet consisted of models from various manufacturers, it was completely converted to HP devices in 2010 in collaboration with IT-HAUS GmbH . These were replaced five years later by another 120 Officejet and Laserjet printers. The city concluded a 60-month full-service lease agreement with IT-HAUS, which gave the municipality both planning security and flexibility with regard to the number of devices at the same conditions. In addition, IT-HAUS provided all services and identified optimization potential in the operation of the fleet in regular review meetings.

Requirements and goals

The standardization of the printer fleet relieved the IT department in the long term. Furthermore, the positive experience with the manufacturer HP and the trust that has grown over the course of the long business relationship prompted those responsible to commission IT-HAUS as a supplier for a third time in 2019. As municipal institutions are particularly obliged to treat documents confidentially, an authentication solution for the multifunction devices was also required this time. This meant that all MFPs should only be able to print documents that are assigned to the authenticated user.

Solution

The first task was to replace the existing devices. In order to sustainably reduce the costs for the infrastructure and operation of the output systems, it was decided to reduce the fleet again to a total of 100 devices at 26 locations and to use only color devices. As one of the wishes of the city employees was for emission-free offices, the city administration had already converted a third of the printer fleet to inkjet printers. Today, almost three quarters of the devices use the innovative HP PageWide technology with pigmented ink and color printing speeds of up to 75 A4 pages per minute. This enables customers to save up to 50 percent on overall printing costs. In addition to printers and small MFPs, copiers were also integrated into the contract for the first time. Almost 20 existing devices were replaced, with the customer relying on HP Color LaserJet in the A3 segment. SafeCom is used as the authentication solution for a total of 42 multifunction devices. Thanks to the so-called Pull Print software, each MFP in the company functions like a personal printer. Users send their print jobs to a queue and authenticate themselves at any device in the network to collect their printouts. They remain encrypted in the virtual print queue until the user authenticates themselves at the device using an employee ID card (end-to-end encryption). This not only increases security, but also reduces the number of uncollected, mixed-up or lost print jobs and therefore material consumption and printing costs. While the customer continues to use the free HP Web JetAdmin configuration tool to integrate new devices into the network, their print environment is managed centrally for all sites using the FMAudit software from ECi Software Solutions. The solution records all relevant data from the existing systems. Daily counter readings, broken down by color, format, duplex, etc., are automatically transmitted, and an automated toner requirement notification is sent to IT-HAUS as soon as a defined threshold value is not reached. The software also automatically reports faults via an encrypted connection so that IT-HAUS , as a service partner, can take quick and targeted action if necessary. By using FMAudit, the city of Idar-Oberstein has created an optimal basis for reducing procurement and operating costs, identifying hidden costs and subsequently reducing them. The data collected via FMAudit also makes it easy to compare devices, settings and fault frequency. For example, IT-HAUS creates monthly reports for the customer on meter readings and failure rates as well as the technician deployments that have taken place.

Benefit

By acting as a single point of contact for customers, IT-HAUS provides them with everything from a single source for the first time - from simple A4 printers to complex A3 systems. In addition to a completely new type of solution with significantly more options and functionalities within its fleet, the customer has a competent and reliable contact for everything to do with output at all times.

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