According to Mohammed Vachiat, product manager at Konica Minolta South Africa, Transnet Capital Projects required a complete, integrated document output solution in order to gain insight into its printing costs, regulate the procurement of new equipment and manage its service levels.

The organisation made full utilisation of the bizhub suite with the implementation of both colour and black and white MFPs with printing scanning, copying and faxing capabilities. Each device was also integrated with the Pcounter ‘follow-me’ printing software, a tool that monitors defined print policies, provides cost recovery options, offers total control of document production environments and ensures security and confidentiality of output with access PINs.

“Pcounter gives Transnet Capital Projects complete visibility of the usage by individuals or departments, accurately assessing print volumes across all devices and facilitating cost savings through the elimination of waste and misuse,” explains Vachiat. “It also assists with device deployment and the re-allocation of machines across the organisation, where usage reports highlight which machines are being over or under utilised.”

Says Yusuf Loonat, CIO, Transnet Capital Projects: “Since the implementation, we are spending much less time managing our document output environment and more importantly, we are saving costs.

“One of the major benefits for us is the reliability of the bizhub range. We have seen a decrease in printer related problems and now have a more flexible, reliable and hassle free document output environment, with higher user satisfaction and increased productivity. Reporting is also much easier and because of the managed services agreement with Konica Minolta South Africa we can easily replace machines or order new devices as and when necessary,” he says.

Konica Minolta South Africa’s good reputation, first-class product range,competitive pricing and BEE status were significant factors in it being selected as outsourcing partner to Transnet Capital Projects.“We needed a vendor with the expertise and capacity to propose a solution and provide a service anywhere, even at our most remote site office. Konica Minolta South Africa’s track record of being able to successfully performprojects on a large scale therefore also counted in its favour,” Loonat adds.