Printers

In trying economic times, smart companies are taking a hard look at the costs of producing hard copies. Dollar-savvy purchasers are turning to the cost-efficient and environmentally friendly alternative of compatible and remanufactured cartridges.

Eckelkamp Retirement Planning, a small business offering independent financial advising services, is one company that saves time and money by ordering remanufactured cartridges. “We’ve been using remanufactured cartridges for years, and have
had a great experience with them,” said Susan Snyder, operations manager for Eckelkamp.

“We deal with mutual funds, stocks, bonds, annuities, etc. We offer financial planning, 401K rollovers, investment planning and
tax reduction strategies,” so it is important that the printouts look good so that clients will trust us with their money, she said. “We prepare important financial portfolio reviews and put together financial statements for customers on a regular basis. We print those from our office printer, and they have to look good.

Making copies isn't brain surgery, but at Florida's Health First chain of hospitals it had become what chief information officer Richard Rogers describes as a "convoluted mess." Nursing stations were overrun by copiers, fax machines, and printers, taking up precious counter space and impeding day-to-day operations.

If getting to (or away from) the machines was a chore, so too was keeping them running. There was no consistent process for ordering toner — departments purchased from a range of suppliers, sometimes buying poor-quality reconditioned cartridges. Some nursing units stocked up on a year's supply at a time, others bought on a more ad hoc basis, and no one knew what anyone else had on hand.

Rogers sought a cure in so-called managed print services, a form of outsourcing that addresses the rationalization of office equipment and its maintenance. Lexmark International won the bid, and its consultants set about analyzing document output patterns throughout the company. They replaced many single-function machines with strategically placed multifunction devices that print, copy, scan, and fax. They also rolled out a system that automatically reorders supplies when needed with no hospital-staff involvement. As a result, Rogers says that hard costs alone have dropped from 3.1 cents per image to 1.4 cents per image.

In today’s office, multifunction devices can print, copy, scan to network destinations, send email attachments, and handle incoming and outgoing fax transmissions. If everyone has access to your multifunction printer, that means just about anyone can launch attacks against the network and network resources ranging from simple (picking up documents left in the output tray) to complex (distributing documents over the network or accessing confidential information).

Xerox is committed to helping you secure your environment and achieve your regulatory compliance objectives through systems, software and services designed to provide security that assures the confidentiality, integrity and availability of critical document and network assets.

The Challenge:
Federal government policy requires that all networked devices used in national security systems meet specific information assurance goals including strict levels of integrity, confidentiality, and availability for systems and data, accountability at the individual level, and assurance that all security claims are objectively verified.

The Solution:
Common Criteria Certification, administered by the National Information Assurance Partnership (NIAP). This is a rigorous process that includes the testing of devices against security requirements by accredited, third-party laboratories.

The Xerox Advantage:
In addition to delivering exceptionally well-architected and highly productive devices into the office environment, Xerox has received Common Criteria Certification for the WorkCentre M35/M45/M55 and WorkCentre Pro 35/45/55. As part of the certification process, the security of the embedded fax function of these devices was also validated. No other multifunction device manufacturer has obtained third party assurance that fax and network lines are separated.

Protecting sensitive, proprietary or classified information has always been challenging. Nevertheless, before the advent of today’s digitally networked offices and increasingly sophisticated threats, maintaining airtight security of confidential documents often meant simply putting those documents away and locking the door behind you at the end of the workday.

In this uneasy, post-9/11 environment, however, managers in government as well as healthcare, financial services, pharmaceuticals and other segments of corporate America are more aware than ever before of the need for deploying more sophisticated document security processes and technologies to ensure confidentiality.