Clifford Chance - Xerox

Increasing productivity and helping to control print costs for Clifford Chance.

Background
One of the world’s leading law firms, Clifford Chance consistently works on a variety of complex and high-profile deals all over the world, and employs nearly 7,000 staff in 21 countries. It’s London office houses around 2,500 employees dedicated to combining the highest global standards with local expertise. Clifford Chance is committed to helping clients achieve their goals, with lawyers advising internationally and domestically in local and cross-border transactions; on day-to-day operations and the most challenging deals.

The Challenge
As for most law firms, printing is mission-critical. In July 2005 Clifford Chance launched a Print Modernisation Programme to ensure its print facilities matched the business’s needs and began looking for a global equipment provider. Although cost containment, which is never off the business agenda, was a key aim of the programme, it was more important that print services supported the productivity of the firm’s busy lawyers and business services staff.

Head of Business Operations, Lee Doyle, summarises the situation: “Our business moves fast, and we rely heavily on technology, especially printing, to serve our clients’ needs. Both financially and environmentally we needed to ensure we were working to maximum efficiency.”

As well as appoint a new print equipment vendor for the whole of Clifford Chance, Doyle had additional plans for the firm’s large London office. With printers aligned under IT and copies being the responsibility of Facilities, Doyle saw the opportunity to streamline processes in the London office and use the transformation as a model that could be rolled out globally.

Doyle was looking to source a Managed Print Service and adopt a pay-per-copy approach. This way, the organisation would benefit from greater flexibility that would allow operations and costs to respond in line with demand.
Specifically, the goals of the programme were:
• Improve the quality of printing service to all users
• Simplify the processes that support printing
• Provide flexibility in the ever-changing work environment
• Integrate the new printing service into existing work practices
• Identify areas for further service enhancements

The Solution
Clifford Chance put in place a thorough tender process, and having considered nine vendors and shortlisting four, the company chose Xerox for equipment supply globally, and also for Managed Print Services in London. Doyle explains: “Xerox’s range of printers, alongside the fact that they would source and manage other manufacturers’ devices, gave us the versatility we needed and the Xerox devices came out top in usability trials with our users.”

Before the contract began, Xerox carried out due diligence using the Six Sigma methodology, talking to users and assessing printer usage. Xerox offered a number of potential printer infrastructure designs that allowed Clifford Chance to weigh up the different service levels and degrees of cost saving that could be achieved. The optimum solution for Clifford Chance introduced more colour printing facilities, provided new MFDs and secretarial printers and gave up the capability to network devices for better monitoring and resilience.

With contracts signed, Xerox Global Services began a phased roll out of the Managed Print Service in December 2007 lasting four months. Clifford Chance gained from the service:
• An on-site team of eight
• Management of all printers, fax machines, paper shredders and multi-functional devices
• Fulfilment of paper supply
• Consolidated invoicing
• Contracted response times of 30 minutes to respond to a fault, and two hours to fix
• Performance management via service level agreements and monthly reporting

The Results
Doyle has been pleased with the results, and the approach Xerox and Clifford Chance have taken to the partnership: “Both parties took the time to get to know each other,” he states. “And as a result, we now have a really robust solution in place.”

“Xerox has delivered on its commitment to us and we have achieved significant savings. Xerox streamlined our print operation so that we were able to cut the size of our fleet from 2840 devices in June 2007 to 2350 in April 2009. Service levels are optimised to support the productivity of our staff and we have significantly better visibility and control of our print environment.”

“The contract is also highly versatile; we can reduce or increase print volumes by +/- 10% before the cost per copy rates have to be renegotiated, which equips us to be highly responsive to market demand.”