From The New Hire Perspective

“I had an amazing opportunity in getting this job right after college, and I think that speaks a lot about the company in general.  Within these doors, there’s such a unique environment, a mix of tenured folks, who really bring so much knowledge and experience to the table, and the fresh faces, eager to start and flourish in their professional lives.  Instead of there being any sort of hierarchy or selfishness, what really stood out to me the most was how much these experienced reps wanted to help out.  The biggest emphasis in their advice was the importance of relationships and that people buy from people. After being here for a year and a half, that’s exactly how I look at it.

If the bottom line for any sales position isn’t to help people out, you won’t be successful. As most would agree, I think the world of “sales” comes with a certain stigma and that’s something that can’t really be avoided.  But what I have noticed is the people that are the most successful and tenured became that way because they were able to create those relationships and trust with these companies.  If I ever lost my vision in that, I’d walk away.  What I enjoy the most about being a part of CTX and the entire Northwest Group is that they created an environment where I felt that anything less was unacceptable.”

We are always looking for energetic, positive and outstanding individuals to join our team!

Click here to view available job opportunities in our Portland, Eugene, Corvallis, Boise, Pocatello, Redmond, Auburn, Yakima and Kennewick offices!

Introducing Technology Change

Congratulations!  Your business is investing in new technology.  You’re eagerly anticipating cries of joy from your team members when they use that shiny hardware, dazzling software, or brilliant process. 

Sadly, users often greet new technology with dismay instead of joy.  Faced with an abrupt change and the need to learn a new process, people can panic and resist.  To decrease panic and increase satisfaction, you need a training plan.  QBSI has helped organizations of all sizes deal with everything from minor adjustments to sweeping business process change.  Here’s what we’ve found works.

1.     Introduce the change.  Tell your team that new technology is coming, when it will arrive, and why the decision was made.  In my role as trainer for QBSI, I’ve heard a lot of variations of “It just showed up one day” and “why do we have to do this?”  We don’t want the users to perceive the new technology as an alien invasion – violent and disruptive.  We want it to be more like a cool new coworker that everyone is looking forward to meeting.

2.     Explain when training will be scheduled.  If training isn’t possible right away, most people will muddle through their basic tasks if they know more instruction is coming.  We’ve found it very helpful to post a “Questions?” sheet in a public place.  Ask users to think about their typical work and what they know they will need the new system to do.

3.     Put resources somewhere accessible.  Many products have electronic documentation and help databases.  Place links to those on a website or in a shared folder, and send an email to tell users where to find them. Physical manuals or “how to” posters can be placed with new hardware.

4.     Identify key users.  Most organizations have either official support staff, or an unofficial technology guru.  Plan additional training for those key users, with the goal that they will be a resource for their coworkers. 

5.     Train on the basics, plus a little bit.  An initial training can introduce the main features and tools. Ideally, aim to cover the basics that all users need, plus a couple of cool and helpful additional features to add excitement about your new technology and keep your more confident users interested.  Don’t try to cover everything.

6.     Plan follow up training for complex projects and needs. These should be smaller sessions that address specific users. For example, for a document management system, some users will need to know how to manage import or archiving.  For document production and printing, identify complex packets or materials.

The goal of this introduction process is for your users to become confident about exploring the capabilities and benefits of their new technology.  Help it be a friend, not an invader.

By Melinda Morrow

Product Support Specialist

Knowing is Half the Battle

I’m a kid of the ‘80s.

I left my Flock of Seagulls hair in 1984. I left my mullet in 1985. I then left my Bon Jovi locks behind in 1986. Don’t ask me about my Living Color shaved head/dreadlocks from 1988 to 1990. I have successfully “misplaced” the remaining pictures/evidence of that fiasco. When it comes to hair, I learned what not to do in the ‘80s.

However, one thing that I still haven’t moved on from is G.I. Joe. No, I don’t have action figures throughout my office (nor at home). I still subscribe to their tagline, “Knowing is half the battle.” I am a firm believer of “I don’t know what I don’t know”, so when something comes along that causes me to shift my thinking – a paradigm shift – I am open to it. I don’t assume I know everything about even the very industry I specialize in – Managed Print Services.

This open thinking has allowed us at CTX to move into areas we previously have not offered service. At first, we only serviced HP, Xerox, and Kyocera printers but over time, we created a business model that allowed us to take on virtually every make and every model of desktop laser printers. This has opened up so many doors for us. We found a way to meet a need in the market – manage any laser printer out there because our potential customers may have ANY laser printer out there. And we haven’t stopped adjusting our business model as needed.

Now let me turn this back on you and your organization. How much do you know about your energy cost in kilowatt hours? Maybe you don’t know personally, but I am positive you or someone in your organization can look that up easily or call someone at PGE (or some other provider) and find out. Knowing this number gives you opportunities to make smart business decisions around that number.

Can you negotiate it down with your current vendor? Are there better opportunities through other service providers to negotiate that number down? Are there new or emerging competitors that offer different services that can provide the same end result (or better)?

Can you communicate the need to reduce energy consumption to your employees? If you were to create an incentive to do so, how much money could you budget to award employees while still maintaining a net reduction in expenses?

Are you able to pinpoint where your energy goes? If so, can you isolate the “worst offenders” and change business practices and habits so that these offenders use less energy? Are there other assets that could replace these “energy hogs” that will create an attractive ROI?

OK, maybe knowing in this case isn’t “half” the battle – it’s more like 10%. As you can see, there is more work to be done after you are in the know. I gave you an easy example. Oregon (and nearly every other state) has initiatives and incentives revolving around energy. There are rebate programs for putting your company’s personal computers on a power management program (please see me if you have any questions – we have a great solution around this). Let’s move on to one area I’m positive into which you have little visibility – printing.

How much do you spend on generating a single page document?

Don’t know? Well, you really should. I can say that because I have seen through my work that knowing this number has allowed companies large and small to reduce their real expenses around printing in a manner similar to reducing their expenses around energy.

Maybe you think that you could do some simple math to determine your cost per print. You know that Staples charges $149.99 per toner and the manufacturer boasts an output of 6,000 pages for that toner. That seems to work out to $0.025 (rounded) per page. Now, as you walk through the office and you see a stack of papers go uncollected on the printer, you know that is approximately $1.45 (for example) wasted. Multiply that out for a year and that number grows. Are you beginning to see the direction I’m going here? This is a great place to START, but don’t stop there.

How much did the printer cost? How old is it? How much……wait.

I’ll save you the many more questions you should be asking. $0.025 is only the tip of the iceberg for calculating your cost per print.

I highly encourage you to request an assessment from CTX (Oregon and SW Washington) or QBSI (Washington). We specialize in working with your administration and IT staff to determine your true cost per print. Once you know that….well, that’s half the battle. What you do with it at that point is up to you. You can continue to watch money sit wasted on the printer or you can take the next step.

What is that step? Well, we can help with that too. Give us a call today.

Daniel Alexander has been the Director of Managed Print Services for CTX since 2010. He has personally helped hundreds of businesses get their arms around what is known in the industry as one of the last unaudited expenses – print management. He can be reached directly at 503-968-0365.

The Great Command Workstation

In the last 13 years, I have held a variety of positions within our company, from sales to technical analyst, to trainer to now the Marketing Director.  In every one of my jobs, there was always one tool that I would use on a regular basis and that is Command Workstation.

EFI’s Command Workstation is software that can be loaded on any computer, in my case Mac OS10.  It is a direct interface to the Fiery print controller, basically the brain of your production/light production device.  It allows you to do so many things to ease your day, here are a few:

1.)   View the Status of your jobs: There are two areas within the main screen of Command Workstation that show the progress of your job.  Whether it is still processing or it is printing 100 of a 500-page job, all this information is at your fingertips.  In my case, this is especially helpful because I sit about three rooms away from the actual device so instead of having to get up every 5 minutes or better yet, sit and stare at the device, I can just simply open the Command Workstation window to verify my job is running and what copy number it is on.  This is one of the most helpful tools in maintaining a productive working day when I have to print on demand.

2.)   Reprint a Job: With a normal multifunctional device, once your job is printed, it is gone forever unless you specifically chose to save it in a mailbox on the hard drive.  In my job, I frequently proof items to make sure that everything is correct in the document before doing a final print.  With Command Workstation and my Fiery, my jobs are always stored for reprint. Therefore, I can send a job, once again from my desk three rooms away, and when I arrive at the printer, if my proof looks great, I can release 10, 100, 1000 more right there instead of going back to my computer.  This is once again a huge benefit in keeping my day productive and efficient.

3.)   Imposition:  Many of us have had to make booklets and getting those pages in the correct order when it is more then four can be quite confusing. It usually ends in manually taking blanks sheets, making a booklet, writing the number on each page, then deconstructing the booklet to see what page lands where.  Within Command Workstation and the print driver at your desk, you can send a single page document to print and simply choose “booklet layout – left binding” and boom, the 10 manual steps you previously did are gone, just like that!

Although there are so many features to help with workflow, imposition, and composition of documents within Command Workstation, these 3 simple but very important features are what I use on a daily basis.  With these 3 simple improvements in my workflow, the productivity of my day greatly increases so that I can continue to print on demand instead of outsourcing in bulk. This also results in saving a lot of money!

Do you have a fiery on your device and want to have all of this functionality at your fingertips? Visit EFI to download now! http://w3.efi.com/en/Fiery/Products/CWS5

Kristen

Northwest Group 

Director of Marketing

What's All The Hype With Solid Ink?

What is the deal with SOLID INK?

The first solid ink printer was created by Tektronix in 1991 and printed at 1 page per minute.  The printers were a big hit in the graphic community because of the bright and high graphic output.  In 2000, Xerox bought this technology and continued to develop it with the primary research and development occurring in at the Wilsonville, Oregon location.  In 2009, Xerox released the first multifunctional product utilizing the Solid Ink Technology named the ColorQube 9200 series. There were some very unique and beneficial elements to this new product that made it a huge success to Xerox and its subsidiaries.

1.) Environmental Benefits: Because these devices use solid ink instead of the normal toner that laser devices use, all the parts that go into a toner device don't exist. Therefore, the waste from toner, waste toner, drums, fuser units and the packaging associated with these items is reduced by 90%.  Not only this, but the space necessary to store these items, the trucks used to ship these items all gets reduced! 

2.) Cost Benefits: These devices also utilize a 3-tier pricing strategy. What is that? Normal laser devices have two meters, a color meter and a black & white meter.  There is no gray area.  On the ColorQube systems with solid ink, there is a 3-tier system that doesn't look at whether the system is color or black & white but actually how much color is being used. For documents that have a color logo in the corner and usually count as full color on laser devices, now can fall into the 1st tier with the rest of your black & white documents.  With a percentage of fill between 3% and 7% in color, ColorQube systems will count that page in the 2nd tier and finally the remaining fill falls in the full color click rate. Since the introduction of the ColorQube series, we have seen a huge amount of documents fall into the 2nd tier, roughly 70%, which dramatically reduces the overall expense of printing color.

3.) Technological Benefits: Xerox introduced these devices with the same multifunctional capabilities as a normal laser device.  You are able to scan to various platforms, print both PS and PCL from Windows or Mac as well as fax and copy.  They also included the important security features that come standard on Xerox devices including data encryption, automatic disk overwrite and an optional removal hard drive.  The system was built for the heavy flow of an office workflow and over the last few years has stood the test of time.  Xerox recently introduced the ColorQube 8700 & 8900 to the product lineup that included this very same technology and advantages but fits a smaller environment both in footprint and volume.

For more information on the ColorQube series and Solid Ink technology, let us know, The Northwest Group - CTX, QBSI, Pinnell!