U OF CALGARY NEW $40M DEAL WITH XEROX

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U of Calgary signs $40-million doc management deal with Xerox
Post-secondary school aims to cut down on $87M in printing costs
The
University of Calgary has started a $40-million document management
project in partnership with Xerox Canada to deal with the estimated 72
million pieces of paper it produces across campus each year.Xerox will
take over print, fax, copy and scan devices under the seven-year
contract, as well as associated contracts with other suppliers to
reduce the administrative burden on university staff, the company said.
The University of Calgary will also lean on Xerox’s expertise to
develop a content management strategy that will reduce the amount of
paper printed per person.Harold Esche, the U of C’s CIO, said the
project evolved from an internal survey which uncovered $8 million in
annual printing costs, and a production of paper that would be roughly
46 times the height of the local landmark, the Calgary Tower. Esche
said the research also showed the school was working with about 145
different copier models and 560 different printers.“We found one
printer that was older than incoming students,” Esche said. “We also
started to look at our inconsistent print environment – there are some
departments on campus where you would pay money to the department to
print, and others where it was handled differently.”The U of C will try
to move towards greater use of electronic record capture, management
and retention, Esche said, starting with its capital projects. The
university spends around $750 million on building and improvement each
year, and these projects tend to generate a lot of paper, he said.“We
recognize that’s not an overnight kind of thing,” he said. “It’s a lot
of cultural change, it’s proving to people (content management tools
offer) a viable mechanism.”The change management problems associated
with printed and electronic content are all too familiar to the
Association of Records Managers and Administrators (ARMA), whose
Canadian arm is hosting a conference on the subject next week in
Toronto. Irene Gelyk, president of ARMA’s Toronto chapter, said it’s
not merely CIOs who are trying to ease the transition from paper to
digital.“It’s the records managers who are trying to get IT on side to
push a lot of this forward as well,” she said.The U of C was already
using Xerox in its central print shop, which Esche said is running more
efficiently than other parts of the campus print environment. The
combined project time will strive to ensure new processes aren’t
laborious for users, while adhering to emerging document and content
management standards, he added.“Things like XML will be key to where we
go with this,” he said. “We want the ability to be able to spend less
time to create metadata and do deeper searches into documents.”Esche
said he doesn’t necessarily expect the project to decrease the overall
number of pages printed, but if the number of pages per person goes
down, that might mean the 8,700 metres of paper spewing out across
campus is being handled more cost-effectively.“I don’t even want to
begin to figure out how many trees that is,” he said.Spokespeople for
Xerox Canada could not be reached at press time.

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May 29, 2006 at 11:32 AM