Case Study: Madera County, CA

Upgrading technology to decrease costs.

About County of Madera, CA

The County of Madera, CA, is located in the Central Valley and the Sierra Nevada north of Fresno county, CA. The government’s mission is to provide the area’s more than 152,000 residents with efficient, cost-effective service while creating new possibilities with partnerships through a diversified economy.

“Everyone appreciated the careful attention of the Ricoh team that helped our staff get the most out of the technology we now have.”
Darin McCandless
Assistant Chief Administrative Officer
Madera County

Challenge

Like many other municipalities, the county government of Madera, CA, needed to maintain their levels of service despite shrinking budgets and staff.

When looking at ways to lower operating costs, officials discovered that their aging, standalone print devices increased both maintenance and print costs. And, their siloed back-end workflows hampered information sharing between departments.

On top of those issues, the new shared facility the county’s departments were moving to didn’t have enough room to store the more than 100 file cabinets of paper files they had.

Building off our over 20-year relationship with the county, we worked with each department to discover their needs and concerns, and develop innovative solutions to address them.

Solution

Our first step was to implement a multi-phase refresh of their printer fleet — replacing their aging, inefficient machines with Ricoh multifunction printers (MFPs) with networked scanning, printing and copying capabilities.

These machines would not only help to reduce operating and maintenance costs, but help ensure that county employees could spend more time helping constituents and less time on machine headaches.

To get them off on the right foot, we even conducted extensive training to reinforce low-cost, efficient printing best practices, such as duplex and black-and-white printing.

Next, to help the various departments share information better, we leveraged their new MFPs by installing scanning solutions that improved workflows while still integrating with their unique backend software.

Finally, we engaged one of our document processing facilities to convert and digitize their paper files within a short three-month time frame. Since our facility can handle a wide range of files, scanning even larger documents like 24” x 36" planning maps wasn’t a problem.

Results

The print device refresh led to considerable short- and long-term savings of:

$41,753 in annual lease payments.
$50,220 in annual fleet maintenance.
$1.5 million through lower-cost print practices.

Future phased migration is estimated to save 34% over their previous models. Plus, copy costs dropped by 50% for most devices. On top of that, workflow and information is now more streamlined across departments. Workers even have the ability to hop online to view usage (including toner levels) and manage supplies for their devices. Finally, the digital document conversion is projected to save the county more than $200,000 in the first year and an additional $300,000 over the next four.

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