THE CHALLENGE
In 2012, Grays went to market, looking to update their entire print fleet. Paramjit Dhillon, IT Operations Support Manager at GraysOnline, said that they knew there were new features and functionality available in printers and multifunction devices (MFD’s), and that there were more competitive pricing structures in the market.
“We had not entirely reviewed our print and document management systems for many years,” said Paramjit. “What we were paying for our previous solution wasn’t competitive. We wanted to be able to better monitor our device usage across all sites, have a greater control over costs and have newer features like secure printing available”.
Grays also have very specific requirements for their invoice printing which made them nervous about the possibility of changing service providers. Traditional auctions are a large part of Grays’ business and there are a lot of features, in terms of customer information, on their invoices. Invoices are printed through an internal management system and, in the past, could be printed on devices loaded with the appropriate form printing software.
“We have key requirements with our invoice printing and we had a solution in place with our previous provider. It was really critical for us to make the new solution compatible with our invoice printing format,” said Paramjit.
Grays underwent a three month process to internally assess their own needs and then go to market in a tender process to find the most suitable vendor. Several service providers, including Toshiba, submitted tender responses for consideration.