Fulham Football Club
Success Story
Fulham Football Club is a professional association football club based in Fulham, West London, England. Founded in 1879, they currently compete in the Premier League, the top tier of English football, following their promotion from the EFL Championship in the 2017–18 season.
Fulham Football Club
company
Fulham FC is a professional association football club based in Fulham, West London, UK. The team currently competes in the Premier League, the top tier of English football. The Fulham FC administrative organisation runs relatively normal levels of office printing each day. However, every two weeks there is a significant peak in print demand when, on home match days, Fulham FC’s Craven Cottage stadium plays host to up to 25,700 fans. In preparation for Match Day, the club must print out thousands of promotional flyers and other items. In addition, all its accreditation passes - media passes for journalists and photographers – must be printed out on specialist, thicker, paper stock. Fulham FC’s existing set of printers was struggling and patience was growing thin.
Industry
Business Services
Product
Printers & Multifunction Devices
In order to produce all its printed material, Fulham FC staff were relying on a variety of aging printers, distributed across three different locations – the stadium offices in Fulham, the club training grounds south of the Thames in Surrey, and another office also in Surrey. The office space at each location is not open plan, so every individual room required its own printer. Furthermore, because three different brands of printer were being used across all the offices, all with rolling customer service contracts, when issues occurred, support was poor. In summary, the club’s print hardware had passed its usability date, which was pushing service costs high.
Fulham FC had two main goals, regaining the ability to rely on its printers and establishing a stable print infrastructure backed-up with solid service support under a single service level agreement.
Arturs Banks IT infrastructure, Fulham FCOur printer fleet was causing staff a lot of problems. Constant failures and call outs, sometimes on a weekly basis for a specific printer, meant we had almost lost our trust in office print technology. Lexmark has restored our belief in the reliability and stability of a managed print solution.
Solution
Fulham FC turned to Workflow Group, a specialist document and print services company and Lexmark business solutions partner, both of which have experience working with football clubs and meeting their requirements. Workflow worked closely with Fulham FC to identify how and where staff use printing and scanning. After a detailed assessment, a new managed print solution was proposed, aiming to stabilise the club’s print environment and provide it with the reliability it required.
The new fleet of Lexmark devices comprised twenty-seven colour multi-function printers (MFPs) and eighteen desktop colour printers in a mix of A3 and A4 sizes, replacing all existing desktop machines. All printers across the three sites are networked and integrated with automated service management software so that consumable use is tracked and toner, paper and parts are ordered and delivered to be available ahead of when they are needed.
Another important benefit is that the Lexmark devices enable the staff at Fulham FC to send print jobs from anywhere but only release them for printing when and where required. Documents can only be released from the queue by swiping an ID card or entering a PIN on the Lexmark device chosen to do the printing, so confidential information stays protected, with printouts no longer left on devices with the possibility of falling into the wrong hands. Documents can be released at any enabled device, whether the device is located across the room or in another building, which helps stop printouts from piling up on devices.
The installation was rapid, with all devices up and running in one full day per site, which meant disruption was kept to a minimum. For peace of mind, the whole deployment is fully monitored and maintained by Workflow and its high level service agreements.
Martin Fairman Managing Director, Lexmark UKFulham FC is a good example of periodic peaks in print demand and how important it is to know that you can rely on the performance of your printer fleet. We are pleased that by working with the team at Workflow, we were able to provide Fulham with a stable print environment that fulfils its needs.
The printer fleet deployment at Fulham FC has provided the club with modern, robust devices that are more responsive, with touchscreen controls, and increased options.
This has resulted in:
▷ A reduction in the volume of colour printing, driving cost-savings
▷ A reduction in paper wastage, helping to support Fulham FC’s environmental policies
▷ Important improvements in security
Last but not least, the club now benefits from Workflow’s highly competitive response times following a customer service request.
Arturs Banks IT infrastructure, Fulham FCLexmark and Workflow have enabled us to achieve our goals of stability and reliability across our print infrastructure. The big test comes every Match Day and I am delighted to report that the printers sail through without a hitch. A big plus has been that we haven’t needed to invest in a specialist printer for our thicker stock accreditation passes as Lexmark’s printers can handle their production perfectly well.