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PRINT.IT
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Education
Visitors to BETT 2013 at
ExCel, London may have
done a double take as they
passed stand B338, not so
much for the demonstration of
origami on display but out of
recognition of a famous name
absent from these shores for
many years.
Triumph-Adler was created
from the merger of Triumph and
Adler in 1957, but its genesis
stretches back to the end of
the nineteenth century when
the two founding companies
started manufacturing bicycles
and typewriters. They later
diversified into motorcycles and
cars but remain most famous for
typewriters sold under the Adler,
Imperial, Royal and Triumph
brands.
Since 1957, TA Triumph-Adler
(it acquired the TA pre-fix in 1984)
has been owned by a variety of
companies including Grundig,
Litton Group, Volkswagen, Olivetti
and most recently Kyocera, which
became the majority shareholder
at the end of 2008 and outright
owner in October 2010.
Recent history
Following the decline of its
typewriter business in the late
TA for the memories
TA Triumph-Adler returns
to the UK.
James Goulding reports
1980s and an unsuccessful
attempt to become a
manufacturer of notebook
PCs under Olivetti in the early
‘90s, TA Triumph-Adler was
effectively run as a distributor of
office equipment and then as a
holding company with interests
in a number of industries,
including the sale and servicing
of copiers.
In 1999, one year after the
production of its last typewriter,
TA Triumph-Adler opened a new
chapter in its history with the
purchase of printer and copier
supplier UTAX and started to
reinvent itself as a document
solutions specialist. TA Triumph-
Adler (TA) is now the largest
document solutions provider
in Europe. In Germany alone it
has 35,000 customers, more
than 200,000 devices under
management and a turnover of
400 million euros.
Direct sales operation
One year ago, TA set up a direct
sales division in the UK to run
alongside its UTAX subsidiary,
which has maintained a UK
presence since 1989 selling
exclusively through resellers.
Based in Swindon, Wiltshire,
TA Triumph Adler (UK) is
targeting end users in the public
and private sectors with a Total
Cost of Ownership proposition
based on fleet audits and
customised solutions that can
deliver savings of 15-40%.
Many suppliers promise
savings of this order, so what
else does TA offer? UK managing
director Shaun Wilkinson cites a
number of selling points, starting
with a broad range of economical
Kyocera-made MFPs with
interesting features like variable
click pricing so that customers
aren’t charged a full colour page
if they print just a logo or a few
lines of text in colour.
He also mentions TA’s
expertise in document solutions,
its servicing capabilities,
comprehensive managed print
services infrastructure, the ability
to react very quickly to customer
demands and, above all, its
ethical approach to business.
“We chose to start TA from
scratch rather than buying a MIF
(an existing supplier’s machine
base), which would have been
easier. We wanted to do it cleanly
without any problems with old
contracts. There are no evergreen
contracts – everything is clear
and transparent,” he said.
“When we go and see
customers over here and they
say ‘We haven’t heard of you’, we
say ‘We have a great pedigree in
Germany’. We have worked with
Deutsche Bank for years and
you only do that if you deliver the
right pricing and service levels
and have the right ethics.”
This message appears to
be going down well. Wilkinson
expects Triumph Adler (UK)
to break even this year and
make a profit in 2013/14, as
it continues to do what it has
done since Adler brought out its
first typewriter in 1898 – offer
businesses a more efficient way
of making marks on paper to
speed up business processes.
www.triumphadler.co.uk
01793 783298.
Staff at TA Triumph-Adler UK practise their
origami skills
Shaun Wilkinson,
UK Managing Director
reports and coursework, online.
Students themselves can work
digitally and upload homework via
the intranet.
“The digitisation of content
– both written and online
content, as well as student-
produced content – causes less
printing than in previous times,”
explained HP’s FitzGerald. “Whilst
worksheets and assignments
continue to be a significant part
of student life, often a student
will only print out a final version
for submission rather than for
each iteration, which means they
need to print less.”
Electronic processes are also
changing teaching methods, as
Nuance’s Simon Hill explains:
“We have a desktop tool in the
education sector – eCopy PDF
Pro Office – that lets teachers
annotate documents and show
mark-ups back to the class
via an interactive whiteboard
and projector. Homework can
be delivered to the school,
scanned in, stored on file with
the teacher’s annotations and
shared electronically.”
Lexmark UK marketing
director Eric Crump expects
such solutions to become much
more common in the education
sector, as suppliers focus on how
to improve teacher productivity.
“Lexmark is looking at how we
take solutions that work very well
in the corporate world to make
life more simple for teachers and
administrators. Because they
have so many transactions per
student and pupil per day, they
are probably more busy than
people in the commercial world,
so it is critical to have electronic
processes,” he said.
Digital communications
Even so, many schools are
failing to make the most of
new technology and still rely on
expensive and inefficient means
of communicating with parents
and pupils.
Capita SIMS claims that an
average secondary school with
1,200 pupils and 90 staff could
save 39,000 sheets of paper,
450 man hours and £8,000 by
using SIMS InTouch to switch
from printed communications to
SMS text and email (www.capita-
sims.co.uk/savewithsims).
For Chris McAree,
headteacher at Caldew School,
savings don’t just come from
lower print and mail costs, but
also improved productivity. “For
first day absence reporting
alone [SIMS InTouch] has saved
one and a half hours of our
attendance officer’s time each
day contacting parents. This
equates to a saving of £3,990
a year. She can now spend this
extra time working with parents
on improving attendance rather
than chasing up the reasons for
a pupil’s absence, which is far
more proactive.”
Spending in the education
sector has been in decline
since 2009/10, but with 43%
of organisations questioned
by Capita SIMS expecting
expenditure on technology/ICT
to rise in the next 12 months,
many more schools will be in
a position to implement more
efficient processes to further
reduce print costs.
See the PrintIT Summer 2013
issue for
Part 3: Print in further
education
.
...continued