THE CLIENT
Brad Jones Racing (BJR) is the only regionally based V8 supercar team in Australia. It is run by brothers Brad and Kim Jones, who has been involved in racing a range of race cars since the 1970s. BJR is a large local employer in Albury/Wodonga, and the business has experienced rapid growth in the past fifteen years.
The company has three highly competitive teams – Team BOC, Lockwood Racing and Team Advam/GB – each racing the latest model Holdens. Drivers, mechanics and others in the support crew for all three teams travel to each of the 16 rounds in the V8 Supercars Championship, to tracks spread across Australia and Auckland (New Zealand). The season begins in February and ends in December each year.
THE CHALLENGE
BJR began in the backyard of Commercial Manager Kim Jones, with four-car stands and a jack, with just Brad and Kim working in the business. With no formal plan in place, new office equipment was bought ad hoc when the need for an individual item or function arose, leading to multiple brands with different consumables and service levels, and double-ups of capability. Despite BJR being a highly technical, very process-driven business in how it builds and maintains its cars, this approach was not applied to its office equipment.
Scanning required a USB stick to be manually inserted into the multifunction device in reception to scan the originals. Because this was so time-consuming and inefficient, minimal scanning was done, leading to a total average monthly print output of nearly 10,000 sheets, split roughly 50-50 between mono and colour (although this was not tracked).
In preparation for race weekends, each travelling crew member is given a personalised travel booklet, outlining every logistical aspect from their flights and accommodation, to morning wake-up times and clothing required. These were individually printed, then manually collated and stapled together into a booklet, which was costly in both time and resources.
Although produced in-house, marketing materials such as presentations were not of the quality BJR wanted. A3 output was on inkjet printers, which were costly to run and slow. Neither did the business have the capability to scan A3 on any device.
“Viatek has been extremely proactive in how they can improve our business. There is great synchronicity too, in the fact we’re both regional and in the technology: our business is very technical and advanced – and so is the equipment Viatek showed us. We’re very happy to partner with them for all these reasons.”
THE SOLUTION
After a detailed site analysis, Viatek recommended removing the seven document-output devices (some of which were not networked) and replacing them with just three strategically placed Fuji Xerox multifunction devices (MFDs) with full connectivity and functionality (copy, print and scan).
Implementation was planned to minimise the impact on the business, and done when a large number of BJR personnel were away at a race meeting. A full training and follow-up day was arranged after the installation to ensure maximum value, with all staff being familiar with the technology and comfortable using it.
"We’re very impressed at the way Viatek went about understanding what printers we had in our business and how we used them, to give us solutions and make them the most cost-efficient. It’s not very often somebody comes into your business and can do that. In this day and age, most people are trying to sell you something - and not necessarily the right thing for you. Even though we’re a very process-driven organisation, with lots of technology, we hadn’t really looked at our office equipment in that way. Now everything is streamlined, and we have much greater efficiencies and quality."
THE RESULT
Having the Viatek print solution throughout the business has reduced overall paper use and increased work efficiency. Because it’s a far simpler process, more documents are scanned instead of printed, which has more than halved BJR’s previously monthly print costs of $1,208.
Producing the individual race-meet travel booklets is now greatly simplified: once all the information is logged, it’s printed as a booklet that is automatically collated and stapled. This has saved one person more than half a day of manual document handling. High print quality means that all marketing materials produced in-house allow BJR to present its business professionally.
Having all equipment under a service agreement from Viatek has freed capital from being tied up in large numbers of different toners, reduced multiple billing accounts to just one, and lowered the time needed by IT staff to monitor ageing, different-brand devices.
