Spam, the Meat, and 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.