Toronto, Ont.–October 28, 2010–Compugen Inc., Canada's largest privately owned IT solutions and services provider, is pleased to announce that it has been recognized at the 2010 Channel Elite Awards ceremony held in Toronto on 16 September 2010 as delivering Canada's best managed-services solution for its managed print services.

Compugen's MPS solution for Mac's Convenience Stores was delivered by Compugen’s Enterprise Imaging Solutions group in conjunction with the customer's move to a new head office location. It started with an assessment of their current printing environment, was followed by a complete rebuild of their entire print infrastructure and print device inventory, and continues to this day with ongoing fleet monitoring and management by Compugen.

The consulting engagement included an assessment exercise, which revealed a number of print-environment problems, and recommendations to the customer around Lease Termination, Technology Refresh, Device Deployment, Management of the Environment and Procurement Standards.

For Mac's, the Compugen winning MPS solution delivered the following bottom line benefits:
User-to-device ratio improved to 7.5:1 for more efficient device utilization, extended device lifecycle and lower cost;
$125K saved by negotiating lease terminations;
Reduced Mac’s monthly print-related spend 80%, which includes the purchase price of the new devices plus Compugen’s monthly fleet management fee (covering monitoring, service and consumables) billed on a cost-per-page (CPP) basis.

"While many service providers sell 'print solutions', Compugen's depth of experience across all areas of IT gives customers a distinct advantage, as Compugen's consultants look at the bigger picture and make recommendations to improve workflow, to reduce the quantity of printing required—for example, by matching equipment to a better workflow—and to match the type of printing to the equipment,” he added.

“You can also provide incentives to change staff behaviour to encourage less printing, enable "follow-me" rules that channel output to the nearest appropriate device, and automatic secure pickup or destruction of print jobs before they are printed (if, for example, you don’t go the device and pick up a print job within a certain amount of time, the job is flushed and never printed). When you combine this with consumables management, the result is secure, high quality output with less waste."

"Many businesses have a mixed environment of print equipment that might include 2 to 3 (or even 4) different manufacturers' print and imaging equipment. This may be due to different departmental requirements or simply due to a lack of standards from a print device perspective. Although a single-vendor environment is ideal from a standardization perspective, it's also possible for a heterogeneous environment to be centrally managed," says Frank Avsenik, print and image solutions director, Compugen Inc., "and the cost savings can be substantial."

"Our new facility in Richmond Hill, which opened in the Fall of this year, will capture many print best practices, such as the use of defaults for colour output, duplex printing, follow-me rules, automatic consumables replenishment, and other service-related alerts. Print tends to lag a bit in terms of implementation of best practices for historical reasons (leasing arrangements, ownership by different parts of the organization). We've looked at the bottom line and agree that we must practice what we preach," Avsenik concluded.