The customer is a pioneering technology leader that works closely with utility, industry, transport and infrastructure customers in roughly 100 countries. With more than four decades at the forefront of digital technologies, they are a leader in digitally connected and enabled industrial equipment and systems with an installed base of more than 70,000 control systems connecting 70 million devices.

Being a pioneer in cutting edge technology, it seems only logical that they also incorporate first class solutions within their own enterprise. But as it turned out, their IT infrastructure was highly complex. There were local agreements, each different from the next, with a large variety of printer hardware brands and software. You name it, they had it. Changes were required and the decision was made to standardize on three hardware brands. This gave them the opportunity to negotiate better deals, which offered large cost savings.

On the software side it was a bit more difficult. Ownership of the print environment had been divided with SAP® printing and end user computing being handled by two different ITO partners. At the time a direct IP printing solution was in the process of being implemented for the Workplace environment. Since so many software solutions were in place, each region operated differently. One of the biggest problems was people being unable to find and connect to printers.

For the Workplace environment the customer wanted support for BYOD, CYOD and mobile printing. In addition they were looking to implement secure pull printing, authentication, printing over VPN connection and high availability.

The customer had many customized forms in SAP that had complex layouts with barcodes, logos and fonts and would be customized to a specific printer brand or print driver. It also required Windows® print servers to process the output.

When they implemented VPSX/OutputManager, there was no more need for complex SAP forms customizations. So they were able to remove 200 Windows print servers. Printing availability and transparency of the print process had increased while the level of complexity had been reduced.

The customer then asked the question ‘can’t LRS provide a centralized solution for Workplace and SAP?’ with the answer being a solid YES. And so it was decided to implement VPSX Enterprise to manage company wide printing. It would provide a centralized overview of company wide printing and prevent printing outages from occurring or allow them to be resolved quickly.

Printing outages had made printing a top priority (where it was quite low before). Not being able to print had really demonstrated the importance of printing. The impact on business operations had become evident. Therefore it put a lot of focus on the project to centralize and improve the availability of print for all global locations. During the Proof of Concept an outage occurred and only those people who had LRS® software installed were able to print. This occurrence helped see the value of implementing LRS worldwide.

BUSINESS BENEFITS

• A consistent and improved end-user experience for more than 130,000 users.
• Decommission Windows print servers that were previously required to support SAP.
• Secure pull printing enabled for output generated in SAP.
• Eliminated the need for customized forms within SAP printing.
• Centralized end to end visibility and management of all print processes.
• Restructuring the print infrastructure led to significant cost savings.
• Replacement of local print vendors due to a centralized global print solution.

KEY DELIVERABLES

• Centralized SAP print delivery and print queue management.
• Vendor neutral pull print solution for SAP and the Workplace environment (Windows, Mac & Linux).
• BYOD, CYOD and mobile printing.
• IT agility with future-proof solutions that can support any new requirement the customer may have, including a hardware vendor agnostic solution for secure pull printing.
• Centralized management for Windows printing, including remote desktop printing.
• High availability (99.9% - 24x7) and auto-failover built-in by design.

Learn how LRS solutions can add value to your print services offering. Visit LRSOutputManagement.com to learn more.