WHSmith chooses Epson heat-free technology printing solutions

Leading global retailer WHSmith has turned to Epson for the overhaul of their in-house printing operations.

WHSmith is a retailer with a presence in over 25 countries, serving its customers from over 1,300 stores across the globe. The company opened its first Australian store in Melbourne, adding new stores in Sydney, Adelaide, and Perth shortly thereafter.

Recently WHSmith had a requirement to completely revamp their in-house printing operations. The company picked Epson reseller Orion Print to supply Epson's Heat-Free WorkForce Pro WF-C579R, WF-C879RTC, and WorkForce Enterprise WF-C17590 printing solutions.

WHSmith Australia Head of IT Support, Saurav Chand, explains, "WHSmith had two major challenges when it came to our printing requirements: our multiple locations and where they were placed, along with a busy customer-facing environment where uptime was of prime importance. The challenge for every WHSmith store was that their printer was either in a regional or difficult-to-get-to location such as a hospital or airport.

Orion Print offered an excellent Epson solution that met our requirements perfectly so that's what we purchased and installed."
Orion Print Management is one of Epson Australia's premier partners. They provide comprehensive content management, accelerating shared business processes by facilitating information-sharing across boundaries for better business insight.

Chand continues, "We had over 40 printers in multiple stores each of whom used to spend tens of thousands of dollars in signage printing. When we did the cost evaluation, we found it was far more cost-effective to replace all of our printers with Epson's heat-free printing solutions. Heat-free print technology means fewer moving parts, so they are more reliable and have increased uptime. The high-yield inks of up to eight times longer than comparative lasers give our staff fewer disruptions and thus more time to attend to their customer's needs."

The WorkForce Pro WF-C579R is a networked compact MFP that features a replaceable ink pack system with extra high-capacity packs that can deliver enough ink to print up to 50,000 ISO pages black/20,000 ISO colour before changing the packs.

The WorkForce Pro WF-C879RTC steps things up printing or copying 86,000 black and 50,000 colour pages without changing the ink. The WorkForce Enterprise WF-C17590 offers an enterprise printing solution that prints 75 ISO ppm with up to 87% lower power consumption than colour lasers.

Minimal interventions in both service and consumables replacement, along with price-performance were WHSmith's key criteria. Chand adds, "Epson excelled on both counts, the reliability of their heat-free Technology not only improved staff morale but also customer service capability. The Epson high-yield ink consumables for both the A4 up to 50,000 pages and A3 up to 100,000 pages provide us with the minimal disruptions we were looking for. It also enabled us to dramatically reduce our overall running costs."

As much as WHSmith appreciated the cost savings of the Epson devices, the real return-on-investment here was the extra time staff could spend with their customers. As a result, with Epson's low cost and efficient printing solutions and Orion Print Management managing their fleet, the WHSmith IT Management team were able to focus more of their time on key IT projects.

Chand concludes, "Using Epson Heat-Free Technology and solutions gives WHSmith a number of key benefits as, critically, we now save tens of thousands of dollars every year, have made our stores more efficient and given every head office team member the ability to organise and print signage for any store across Australia at the simple click of a button."

Epson Australia offers an array of image capture and image output products for the commercial, industrial, consumer, business, photography and graphic arts markets. It is also a supplier of value-added point-of-sale solutions for the retail market. Epson is a market leader in Australia and worldwide in sales of projectors for the home, office and education. Established in 1983, Epson Australia is headquartered in Macquarie Park NSW and is a subsidiary of the Epson Group headquartered in Japan.