Spam, the Meat, and Managed Print Services
Summary: Rachel Fielding delivers a great report on how the company that sells Spam in England moved to Managed Print Services.
Doc loves an occasional helping of fried Spam and eggs, especially when he’s visiting his buddies in the U.K. (Love the cars – not so much the food.) So when I saw a great report on how the company that sells Spam in England moved to Managed Print Services, I just had to bring it to your attention.
It’s actually part of an excellent 4-part series on MPS that appeared in Computing.co.uk by Rachel Fielding. This entry, part 4, chronicles the transition to MPS for the meat packer:
For Tony Brown, IT director at Warwick-based meat product manufacturing company Tulip, spam is something of an occupational hazard. Tulip is the UK’s leading pork manufacturer, and produces and sells bacon and other processed meat products under brands including Danepak and supermarket own labels. It also sells Spam and Stagg products for Hormel Foods International in the UK.
In the same way that the company’s abattoirs have been streamlined using technology - the company offers visitors to its web site a virtual tour to illustrate the point - the company’s print management strategy has transformed the way in which it does business - and saved a six-figure sum in the process.
Having grown dramatically through acquisition over the past decade, Tulip found itself in a situation where it was operating across 18 sites, each running different print systems, buying different print consumables and generating significant administrative overheads.
“We didn’t know who was buying what. We had a huge number of suppliers. It wasn’t efficient and certainly wasn’t cost-effective,” Brown says. “At one site we had seven different printers from six different suppliers all sitting on one bench.”
Find out more and the secret recipe for Spam (just kidding about the secret recipe part). But still worth a read. The entire series is well done.
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ZDNet introduces Doc (The DocuMentor), sponsored by RICOH. Through his blog, Doc will educate you about Document Management. So who is Doc? Doc is something of an enigma. He was born to a Russian ballerina and a German electrical engineer who some believe was running covert operations for shadowy corporate interests. Doc grew up in various locations in the United States, although no one seems to know precisely where, least of all Doc. His early schooling was unremarkable except for the time he was caught trying to replace all the mimeograph machines with high-tech color copiers that had mysteriously disappeared from a shipment to Albania. At MIT, he made a name for himself by transforming a large printer into a robot that hunts and eats Roombas. Professionally, he reportedly has seen the insides of more brands, versions, and generations of printer and printer-related hardware than almost anyone. Some say his obsession with paper, printing, and mechanical movement was either started by, or evidenced by, a traumatic childhood episode when he crawled inside an old Xerox 2400 and tried to print himself.
Anyway, Doc has hands on experience with stuff like printer maintenance and fleet management, but his mastery of document management leaves no stone unturned. Important issues like sustainability, security, and regulatory compliance are top of mind for Doc, as are other business technology needs like networking and IT services, making him a true blue IT renaissance man.
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