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Executive Summary
The Issues
The Canon Solution
The Results
The Canon Difference
Investment banker, ABN AMRO, selected Canon when its previous supplier failed to provide solutions that added up
ABN AMRO is a leading provider of wholesale and investment banking products and services across Australia and New Zealand.
It employs over 750 people in offices in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Auckland and Wellington, with sales representatives in London, Hong Kong, Frankfurt and New York. Staff at each location are focussed on providing financial solutions for clients, seeking to bring together those seeking to raise capital with those seeking appropriate investments.
As such, it has a strong sector focus, supported by a comprehensive range of products and services and a truly global network, conducting its business through branches of ABN AMRO Bank N.V. and subsidiaries.
"We produce a lot of colour proposals for companies and these documents can be thousands of pages thick, produced many times. You have to have them produced, bound and delivered on time - and if you find your machine suddenly hangs up, you could miss the whole tender process."
- Linton Scott, Director of IT, ABN AMRO
Executive Summary
Unhappy with the service and support on its previous range of colour printer/copiers, ABN AMRO looked to Canon to provide a printing solution which offered high quality, high performance, high reliability colour printing and associated features (such as booklet making), for its staff.
The new solution, which was rolled out across the busy organisation during 2002, has pleased staff and increased efficiencies to the point where IT Director, Linton Scott, is happy to walk the floor on a day-to-day basis and speak with staff, safe in the knowledge that he won't have to hear complaints relating to printing.
The Issues
- ABN AMRO required a colour printing solution which simply offered high quality, dependable performance with new features (such as document binding), for its staff to use in its busy office environment.
- ABN AMRO was also unhappy with the service and support on its previous range of colour printer/copiers, so placed particular emphasis on this aspect of the relationship they would enter with a new printing partner.
According to Linton Scott, Director of IT, ABN AMRO, staff were, "frustrated beyond belief" with the quality and service of the printing devices previously installed at the company and needed something that could produce the high quality users required at the speed they wanted with very, very high reliability. Indeed, service loomed large behind ABN AMRO's decision to select Canon.
Operating in the investment/banking market, ABN AMRO often has to prepare proposals for companies that can run to several thousand pages in length. It is the printing requirements of documents such as these - which often have to be printed more than once - in addition to the regular day-to-day printing needs of a 21st century office, that set ABM AMRO looking for a partner which could deliver both superior hardware and the support excellence it to keep it running.
"Our adoption of Canon equipment really came down to the kind of service which Canon could offer. Basically, we wanted a company that would take an interest in what we were doing and which was sympathetic to the importance of what we were doing and would work with us to just get things done," said Mr Scott. "Canon has done this for us. Among other things, it was able to promise us a certain redundancy at their local office in the city and that they would respond quickly if we had an after hours call and it's delivered."
According to Mr Scott, Canon has so far accomplished this in a "much happier environment" than the business has experienced in the past.
The Canon Solution
- The Canon CLC5000 and iRC2105 devices provide colour printing solutions to ABN AMRO built on a solid background of reliability and service.
- Both of the devices Canon selected for ABN AMRO were capable of colour printing, due to the high demand for colour in its office.
Canon installed three of its CLC5000 devices at ABN AMRO - currently its fastest single colour printer/copier in the range. At a price point considerably lower than similar competing products, it outputs 50 full colour pages per minute at a quality of 400 x 800 dpi and has a standard paper capacity of up to 5,350 pages. This means a possible paper capacity of a mammoth 5,350 A4 sheets, or 3,350 A3 sheets.
"There's not many vendors which can produce the level of quality and robustness that we require in a printer, so you are limited in many respects to Canon or one of its few competitors," said Mr Scott. "We had some previous experience with Canon and its equipment had been pretty reliable so we decided to give them a try. We'd had a gutful of our existing installation, so we had to do something."
Canon also installed four of its innovative iR C2105 devices that can be configured for network printing or copying and network printing. At ABN AMRO, the latter option has been adopted, with staff able to use the devices as both a copier and network printer. Staff have been particularly impressed by the device's multiple cassettes which handle all paper sizes from A5R to A3+ and a finisher which offers stapling and has a large stacking capacity. While some devices have been fitted with a Saddle Finisher which provides automatic paper folding with dual stapling - enabling fast, practical booklet production.
According to Mr Scott, the Canon machines installed at ABN AMRO produce a lot of regular day-to-day office printing work in colour, but which also produce business-specific documents, such as proposals for companies that are going to float, and which ABN AMRO might be advising.
"We produce a lot of colour proposals for companies and these documents can be thousands of pages thick, produced many times. You have to have them produced, bound and delivered on time - and if you find your machine suddenly hangs up, you could miss the whole tender process," said Mr Scott.
The Results
- ABN AMRO employees are no longer reaching for the phone number of their nearest copy shop when a big print job looms near.
- ABN AMRO employees are also empowered by the features of both the CLC5000 and iRC2105 models to produce powerful documents.
"We had reached the point with our previous printing devices where we were using external print shops because of the unreliability of our previous supplier and its equipment," said Mr Scott. "With the Canon equipment in place we've been able to stop doing that and everything's come back inhouse. So we're saving money in that respect, quite considerably."
Mr Scott is also impressed by Canon's solution, deeming both models selected by ABN AMRO to be "feature rich."
"We're actually going through a secondary training period just to come to grips with all the features of the devices. When you install something so talented, it's pretty hard for your staff to take all the features in at one time," said Mr Scott. "So we let them just use the machines however they wanted, following their first round of training. Now they're coming through with the second round of training so they can come to grips with it and learn even more tricks."
The Canon Difference
"Beyond the actual cash flow improvements which the Canon equipment has brought us, I think the whole pressure in the business has eased, which you can't put a value on," said Mr Scott. "The joy of just not having to worry as we did before about whether we could even get things printed on time has subsided."
"Canon's staff are good; they're first class - every one of them. They are also very professional and have demonstrated an interest in what we're doing and have met our expectations in every respect. It was a great decision to move across to Canon, I have no regrets at all," Mr Scott added.
According to Mr Scott, a printer without great support is useless.
"So now we have both - a great printer and the service organisation behind it - Canon," concluded Mr Scott.
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