Managed Print Services at State of California Health Department

The Department of State Hospitals (DSH), a State of California Department whose 13,000 staff strive to provide effective treatment to the more than 9,000 patients annually at their five statewide 24/7 facilities recently shifted to Xerox Managed Print Services (MPS). The decision took the department to a consistent infrastructure environment, from having hundreds of different printing device models and multiple brands to having just eight Xerox models.

Although the organization decided to take the direction of Managed Print Services (MPS) before the current responsible IT Manager stepped into his role, he embraced the decision. He looked at both the organizational and financial benefits. The department saw increasing costs for toner, paper, and other supplies. They were also overwhelmed with managing requests for repairs at locations across the state. The department was looking for "an easy button." and they decided to purchase something so they wouldn’t have to worry about constantly monitoring and tracking. Now, supply levels are continuously monitored, automatic orders are generated, and Xerox is dispatched when service tickets open.

Their lesson learned that continued and even increased in importance during the pandemic was hammering out processes around technicians coming out onsite because we are working in secure locations and needed to have techs escorted while onsite.

The department decided this project was a priority in the year before the pandemic. The department already served a distributed workforce, but in 2020 that grew to include a further distributed workforce. One of the unexpected values of the project was the ability to leverage Xerox and their partners. The department worked on an e-fax solution with OpenText that allowed them to support the Sacramento headquarters. The solution was stood up in just a few months and is now being rolled out to other locations where VoIP communications are in place.

An additional convenience is that through the Xerox Workplace Cloud, employees can use badge scanning to print on any device. Additionally, several home devices are being supported for employees who are permanently working from home.

Data is now driving and supporting printing decisions. Monthly and quarterly reports are generated along with live dashboards to give an accurate picture of the entire MPS scope. Reports shed light on high device usage so decisions can be made to swap out old or overused equipment. They are not making that decision and justifying it based on data, not just somebody thinking they need a new device.