Sport Lisboa e Benfica Case Study

Customer Profile

Sport Lisboa e Benfi ca Futebol SAD is a Portuguese company that manages the famous professional soccer team Sport Lisboa e Benfica and other sports teams. Through subsidiaries and other affiliates, it also builds and manages stadiums, operates an investment fund, and runs an insurance brokerage.

The well-known sports institution, Sport Lisboa e Benfica Futebol SAD, owns a huge fleet of different brands of local printers and multifunction printers (MFPs). Tracking costs accurately or securing sensitive information was impossible. The company wanted to optimize the fleet of printers to make it easier to manage, reduce printing costs, and ensure that the print environment was secure.

Challenge

Addressing Printer Disarray: From Untracked Costs to Security Risks

The number of the company’s small, unmanaged local printers had grown 
exponentially, making it impossible for the company to track and manage costs. MFPs in corridors had messy stacks of uncollected printed documents, including those with sensitive information that should not be available to anyone who walked by.

Simplifying IT Challenges: Overcoming Diverse Printer Fleets and Costs

In addition, the wide array of vendors and printer models made it difficult for IT to manage and maintain the sprawling fleet. Whether attempting to maintain a complex inventory of supplies or trying to keep print drivers up to date, every task had become time-consuming and complex. The cost of printing had spiraled out of control. 

Partnering for Efficiency: Sport Lisboa e Benfica's Leap with Konica Minolta and YSoft SAFEQ 6

Sport Lisboa e Benfica Futebol SAD contacted Konica Minolta. The first tasks were to assess the company’s printing needs to optimize the fleet and centralize management of the print environment to get costs under control and keep information safe. Konica Minolta’s answer to this complex problem combined a streamlined fleet primarily consisting of MFPs, and a unified print management solution – YSoft SAFEQ 6.

Solution

Three YSoft SAFEQ 6 features—Print Roaming, Rule-Based Printing, and Reporting — were critical to reducing costs and making printing more secure.

The Print Roaming feature was crucial to eliminate uncollected jobs at the printers. Print Roaming stores the job in the print queue and only releases the job to print once the employee uses a smart card to authenticate at a printer. This has three clear benefits. First, the user can pick up the job at the most convenient printer anywhere in the company. Second, documents are more secure because there is less chance that printed jobs will be left uncollected and unattended at the printer. Finally, if a print job is not released to print within a predefined time, it is automatically deleted from the print queue.

Rule-based Printing is another important feature that helped Sport Lisboa e Benfica Futebol SAD reduce costs. This versatile feature lets administrators set up detailed print and copy rules for each employee role. For instance, the company can implement a rule to limit expensive, high-resolution color printing for employees in the Sales and Marketing department.

At Sport Lisboa e Benfica Futebol SAD, another significant change was eliminating single-sided color printing for internal documents. The company uses Rule-Based Printing to enforce black-and-white, duplex printing for all internal documents. As a direct result of this single rule, the company has reduced the total cost of printing by 7%. A second money-saving rule routed most color documents to an MFP that prints high-quality color prints at a much lower cost.

Another revolutionary change was centralized management and tracking of print costs. Previously, the true cost of printing had been largely unknown. Thanks to YSoft SAFEQ 6’s Reporting feature, the company can now generate a precise view of the number of jobs and pages printed and the exact costs attributed to each department or even a specific user.

“After the Konica Minolta analysis of our print environment, we decided to follow their recommendation and implement the YSoft SAFEQ 6 solution.”

"This change completely fulfilled our needs, the number of printed pages has decreased, and the total cost of printing has been greatly reduced. We don’t see any uncollected print jobs at the printers, so we know our sensitive information is safe."

Applied Solution Overview:

• Managed Print Solution (MPS) implemented: YSoft SafeQ 4 Professional
• Terminals: Konica Minolta embedded terminals with card authentication
• Locations: 3 sites / 34 MFPs + 7 printers
• Infrastructure: One central print server and external SQL database server
   

Benefits

With the YSoft SAFEQ 6 print management solution, Sport Lisboa e Benfica Futebol SAD is confident that all printed, copied, or scanned documents containing sensitive information are secure.

In addition, the company has decreased the cost of printing and significantly reduced resource waste. Total print volume has decreased to 1.7 million pages per year, and the ratio of less expensive black-and-white documents to color documents is 60:40.

Saving Time and Gaining Visibility

What’s more, the YSoft SAFEQ 6 solution is not only saving paper and toner – it is saving time too. The IT department can focus on other priorities because much less time is spent on print-related management and maintenance tasks. Company management is also satisfied with complete and accurate visibility into print costs anytime they need.