Gleneagle Hotel Group

About the company

The Gleneagle Group is one of the longest running hospitality and event companies in Ireland, founded in 1957 with the opening of the Gleneagle Hotel. Today, the company includes the Irish National Entertainment Centre, the largest indoor entertainment centre outside of Dublin, the Killarney Convention Centre and seven independent hotel locations which at peak could be catering for 4,000 guests or delegates with 250 staff on duty.

The challenge

The Gleneagle Group, as in any smart modern business, carries out a majority of its communications electronically. However, there was a serious demand within the company for greater in-house print functions at its various locations. In the Gleneagle Group, the range extends from creating bills for guests, check-out menus, meeting agendas, signage, notices – both for internal activities and for meetings and conferences – to a wide range of publicity material, including posters and leaflets.

In the print audit conducted by OKI for the Gleneagle Group in July 2014, the annual print volume was over 857,000 pages from 46 separate devices in multiple locations. This review was triggered as part of an overall analysis of the group’s procurement policies and processes, with the print function being assessed as part of its IT expenditure.

“Naturally, we were looking for potential cost savings,” explains Clio O’Gara, Chief Marketing Officer. “But the purchasing review is an extended programme, a root and branch examination and essentially focussed on looking for better management of our suppliers and the processes. It is about adding quality and gaining efficiencies. We accepted the OKI proposal for a Managed Print Service primarily to delegate responsibility to expert specialists for this important but not central function. But the package was certainly made even more attractive by the promise of 30 per cent savings year on year.”

The solution

The managed service by OKI and its partner Tierney’s Office Automation began in late 2014. Tierney’s have been the Gleneagle Group’s ICT partner for some years.

The Ennis-headquartered company have been providing a range of IT products and services, support and consultancy for over 25 years specialising in the hospitality industry.

OKI started the project by conducting an initial audit, followed by replacing the Gleneagle Group’s 46 printing devices across all of its locations, with 38 OKI printers. Though the total number of devices was still relatively high, each device was deemed necessary in order to effectively serve the company’s disparate locations. A majority of the newly installed devices were multifunction printers (MFPs), which provided the Gleaneagle Group with a number of useful features, including scan-to-email, records or application workflows, copying and faxing as well as printing in both colour and mono.

The benefits

“Certainly one of the main attractions of an MPS, and it has been well proven in practice, is saving the time of our own IT and other staff,” says O’Gara. “So things like automatic ordering of consumables, immediate Help Desk responses at the end of the phone and all of the other minor headaches associated with print are taken away. In fact it was only when the MPS was in operation for a few months that we realised exactly how much of our staff resources it had all been taking up.”

Another valuable feature provided by OKI has been the accurate monitoring of costs. “It’s a bit early to comment definitively on the savings, although they certainly appear to be in line with our expectations,” adds O’Gara “The key thing is that our costs – and the former reasons for wastage and inefficiency – are now under control. We used to buy printers in each of the six businesses as someone decided a new one was needed. Before the review we had over 20 different types of cartridge and still were often out of the specific one required – usually very urgently. Now we have only four types and they are always available.”

As well as significant time and cost savings, another major advantage provided by OKI’s Managed Print Services is the new range of capabilities OKI printers provide for the Gleneagle Group’s in-house design team.

“We sell entertainment, so we’re very much in the poster business and we produce many other types of promotional material,” says O’Gara. “We can also offer a complete print and signage service to our conference clients, with fast response times when they discover additional print material is needed. More than once an error has been discovered in a programme or menu just as thousands

of delegates are arriving.”

The future

Having adopted OKI’s Managed Print Services just two years ago, the Gleaneagle Group is looking forward to a future in which they can offer their guests and clients a whole new range of features.

“Having our own in-house print facility, complemented by our graphics design team, means we can produce a wide range of short-run material to a high professional standard at a reasonable cost,” says O’Gara. “We like to manage our brand identities tightly, for instance, so our logos and colour schemes are always consistent across all material because the process is under our own control.”

The OKI Smart Managed Print Services programme encompasses a range of tried and tested methods and tools to establish the current state of an organisation’s print related costs and processes before OKI create a professional bespoke proposal to suit individual customer specific requirements. Our sales and engineering staff work closely with our key partners to offer Managed Print Solutions with maximum customer value.