WHSmith is a leading global retailer with a presence in over 25 countries, serving its customers from over 1,300 stores across the globe. The company opened their first Australian store in Melbourne then added new stores in Sydney, Adelaide and Perth shortly thereafter. Recently WHSmith had a requirement to completely revamp their in-house printing operations and for that they turned to Epson reseller Orion Print and Epson’s Heat-Free WorkForce Pro WF-C579R, WF-C879RTC and WorkForce Enterprise WF-C17590 printing solutions.
WHSmith Australia, Head of IT Support, Saurav Chand, explained, “WHSmith had two major challenges when it came to our printing requirements – our multiple locations and where they were placed, along with a busy customer-facing environment where uptime was of prime importance. The challenge for every WHSmith store was that their printer was either in a regional or difficult-to-get-to location such as a hospital or airport, so we decided to change this and make the entire operation far more efficient. We initially had multiple technology partners, including Orion Print, who supported multiple printers across our business. Orion have good customer service and offered an excellent Epson solution that met our requirements perfectly so that’s what we purchased and installed.”
WorkForce Pro WF-C579R
Orion Print Management is one of Epson Australia's Premier Partners. They
improve organisational effectiveness by providing comprehensive content
management, accelerating shared business processes by facilitating information-sharing across boundaries for better business insight.
Chand continued, “We had over 40 printers in multiple stores each of whom used to spend tens of thousands of dollars in signage printing. When we did the cost evaluation, we found it was far more. It was cost effective to replace all of our printers with Epson’s Heat-Free WorkForce Pro WF-C579R, WF-C879RTC and WorkForce Enterprise WF-C17590 printing solutions. Epson's Heat-Free print technology means fewer moving parts, so they are more reliable and have increased up time. The high-yield inks of up to 8 times longer than comparative lasers give our staff fewer disruptions and thus more time to attend to their customer’s needs.”
WorkForce WF-C879RTC
With minimal interventions in both service and consumables replacement as one of their key criteria, along with price-performance, WHSmith was able to clearly see and understand the benefits the Epson solution would bring to the table.
Chand added, “Epson excelled on both counts, the reliability of their Heat-Free Technology not only improved staff morale but also customer service capability. The Epson high-yield ink consumables for both the A4 up to 50,000 pages and
A3 up to 100,000 pages provide us with the minimal disruptions we were looking for. It also enabled us to dramatically reduce our overall running costs.
In short, switching to Epson’s Heat-Free Technology printing solutions gave us a cost and time-effective solution for our business so we can easily print, scan and manage with efficient reporting and easy troubleshooting.”
WorkForce Enterprise WF-C17590
As much as WHSmith appreciated the cost savings of the Epson devices, the
real return-on-investment here was the extra time staff could spend with their
customers. As a result, with Epson’s low cost and efficient printing solutions and Orion Print Management proactively and professionally managing their fleet, the WHSmith IT Management team were able to focus more of their time on key IT projects.
Saurav Chand concluded, “Epson products, services and solutions stand head and shoulders above their competition as they are far easier to manage and troubleshoot. Using Epson Heat-Free Technology and solutions also gives WHSmith a number of key benefits as, critically, we now save tens of thousands of dollars every year, have made our stores more efficient and given every head office team member the ability to organise and print signage for any store across Australia at the simple click of a button.”
