Schneider Electric In-plant Adds Canon Job Submission Software
Kris Tanner, manager of the Solutions Support Group / Print On Demand for Schneider Electric.
The in-plant at Schneider Electric, a Nashville, Tenn.-based specialist in energy management and automation, has selected Canon’s PRISMAdirect and PRISMAprepare solutions to help streamline the company’s order submission and file preparation process.
The implementation followed a review of multiple vendor proposals, notes Kris Tanner, manager of the Solutions Support Group / Print On Demand for Schneider Electric.
“Canon came back with the best solution,” he says. “PRISMAdirect has brought a level of engagement and self-help for our customers that we were lacking, allowing them to make smarter decisions, better leverage our services and ultimately increase their satisfaction.”
The solutions brought numerous operational efficiencies, he says, including cutting prep time in half and freeing up staff to handle other needs. They have also opened up new business possibilities, such as building a Schneider Print On Demand e-commerce site using the PRISMAdirect solution to highlight relevant products that customers may not even be aware exist.
“With the addition of Canon’s solutions, our staff of six has the ability and capacity to handle almost double the business that we were handling with the same equipment just a few years ago,” says Tanner.
When the department first started offering print-on-demand services, it was typically serving internal clients within its facility. As word of mouth spread and other business units wanted to take advantage of the pricing and the services provided, the business grew rapidly. By 2016, the in-plant had nearly tripled from an average of 24 million pages annually in 2010 to over 60 million pages annually.
Adding PRISMAdirect and PRISMAprepare has brought Schneider Electric numerous operational efficiencies including cutting prep time in half and freeing up staff to handle other needs.
The growth is being driven by new services and capabilities including digital color printing, large-format printing and fulfillment services to support an expanding range of internal customers across the U.S.A. The in-plant provides print and digital media solutions with its arsenal of Canon imagePRESS digital color presses and varioPRINT 135 Series monochrome presses as well as electronic delivery of information and archival media, wide format and promotional items. The growth did not come without challenges.
“As our fulfillment orders grew, we started to see some slowdowns in our workflow, mainly from processing and preparing the orders coming to us,” says Tanner. “We knew we needed to engage our internal customers faster and with more accurate data, and really put the ordering and the decision-making of the customer on the front-end submission.”
