Bakers Delight has moved to an Upstream unified printing solution, reducing the cost of printing services by 18 per cent over 12 months.
Speaking to CIO Australia, Bakers Delight CIO, Joanne Stubbs, said the project was driven from a desire to improve business efficiency.
“Bakers Delight in itself is constantly driven to reduce costs and improve the business efficiency so that can flow through to the franchisee,” she said. “So if we managed to do that internally at head office, the administrative costs are less.”
Stubbs said the baking giant had a variety of printing vendors operating throughout multiple franchises, and that unifying printers across the business was vital.
“Prior to me coming on board as CIO, they hadn’t had a CIO [at Bakers Delight] before, so there were disparate contracts throughout the business, some of which were signed by people without the authority to sign them,” she said.
“The printing companies had got in there and thought it was an easy catch and were charging exorbitant amounts of money for one printer in one office, so we added all those costs together and got rid of the ones that were ripping us off and rolled them all together in Upstream.”
The Upstream solution consisted of a streamlined fleet of devices and servicing, achieved a 50 per cent increased capacity to improve business efficency and includes a 'Find Me' solution that allows users to authenticate their identity on any printer.
Stubbs said the deployment took a month, with only a few bumps in the road being felt on the way; many of which she attributes to “user error some of the time”.
“It cleaned up processes within the business in trying to get it working properly,” she said. “There were some departments not being billed correctly, but that wasn’t the software's fault, it was more that the finance department didn’t have departments keyed up the right way.”
As well as unifying the company, Stubbs said the deployment has achieved greater cost savings than first anticipated.
“Although we initially set up the contract that it would cost us a certain amount per annum, it worked out that we could reduce that by about $1000 a month after the first year,” she said. “It cleaned up processes within the business in trying to get it working properly.”
Next on Stubbs’ IT agenda is to upgrade Bakers Delight’s networks and upgrade software across the business units.
“Last year’s strategy was to get on top of all of the business projects and make sure they were delivered on time and within budget, and set up a project office properly so that it was accountable,” she said.
“This year it’s [been about] clean up, there’s a lot of pieces of disparaged pieces of software sitting there that do exactly the same thing, as well as our network needs to be sorted out and made a lot more efficient in terms of software upgraded”