UK’s leading meat manufacturer slices costs with Ricoh

UK’s leading meat manufacturer slices costs with Ricoh

Tulip Ltd achieves substantial cost and carbon savings with Ricoh IT solution

Tulip Ltd, part of The Danish Crown Group, and the UK’s largest producer of pig meat has selected Ricoh to reduce its IT costs. The company provides a range of products including pork, bacon, sausage and cooked meats to the retail and foodservice sectors, and employs around 7,000 people at 18 manufacturing sites across the UK.

Managing print forms is a critical part of the company’s business and administrative operation.  But the company was suffering from inefficient print facilities.  Almost every one of Tulip’s locations ran its own independent print operation from buying equipment and maintaining it to managing and ordering consumables.  The result was a mixture of around 18 different suppliers, printers that ranged from very new to ten years old and little or no information about what users needed or how much was being spent on print.

“There were many different contracts and agreements and many different suppliers for consumables.  One of the difficulties in getting accurate information was each location would cost printing in a different way.  What we found in one of our offices exemplifies the problem – seven different printers from six different manufactures sitting on one table,” said Tony Brown, Group IS&T Director at Tulip.

The company needed a solution which would bring all print related costs and management into a single operation. “The fact that Ricoh builds its own hardware and develops its own software meant we would be able to have our own bespoke products which, in the end, helped reduce costs,” said Simon Delahunty, Group Operations and Support Manager, Tulip Ltd.

“One of the other notable things about Ricoh has been the excellent project management both before and since working with Ricoh.  The team is very knowledgeable and the practical, step-by-step process to the project has been very effective,” he added.

Tulip deployed Ricoh’s Managed Print Service (MPS) that, as well as managing hardware replacement, includes print management applications and support services.  Tulip was able to cut the number of devices it used to have by 50 per cent, replacing almost 500 existing devices with 246 Ricoh products.  These include a mix of colour and mono printers, faxes, scanners, copiers and multifunction products. Part of the solution involved developing a completely new a print driver just for Tulip to regulate how printers are used.

In addition, Tulip is using Ricoh’s @ Remote software application which automatically reports on print activity across the whole organisation.  Among its other functions, Ricoh’s @Remote software monitors equipment power consumption, enabling unique ‘green reports’ to be produced.  Tulip is in the process of using this information to establish codes of practice and set consumption targets for each location to help further reduce its carbon footprint.