Ellis Air Conditioning delivers a wide range of heating, ventilation and air conditioning projects to various clients in the residential, commercial, education, healthcare and sporting sectors. With more than 50 years in the business, the company has successfully completed mechanical services projects and preventative maintenance programs for clients across multi-storey residential apartments, commercial offices, sports stadiums, education facilities, and hospitals. Their projects encompass heating, ventilation and air conditioning design, installation and maintenance.
Ellis Air Conditioning’s year-on-year growth is attributed to its ability to successfully address and satisfy a wide range of projects from clients and prospects. Clients deal directly with the company’s experts from the concept stage to completion and the entire process is carried out by the in-house team of professional engineers.
However, establishing and reaffirming its position as the industry leader also brought to the forefront some major challenges, which impeded the company’s continued business growth.
Challenge: Printing bottleneck
Ellis Air Conditioning’s growing reputation drew the attention of prospective clients, increasing the workload for the company. The team was responding to up to 10 quotes each week for major residential and commercial developments. The printing volume increased to almost 2,000 square metres per month.
The existing printing device was unable to keep up with the increased printing volumes, resulting in staff members having to wait to get their prints. The estimating and design teams were seriously affected by these bottlenecks – the highly skilled estimators and designers could wait up to six hours for a print job to be completed, causing considerable frustration.
Workflow productivity was a critical driver in the search for a better solution. Adam Langford, Ellis Air Conditioning’s general manager, explains, “We needed to respond quickly to tender requests, and at the same time quickly execute projects we were undertaking. In the design and installation stage there could be up to 200 changes to the technical drawings – all for legitimate reasons – which needed to be speedily adapted and delivered to all interested parties.”
The quality of the print output was another factor. The new printer needed to guarantee consistently high-quality printed outputs for technical drawings.
“Reliable and vivid colour was a major requirement because on the drawings, services such as air or water are depicted in different colours. These days almost 95% of the drawings we produce are in colour.”
Solution: HP PageWide XL 4000 MFP
“We decided to see what solutions were available and looked at several brands. After our analysis we decided on the HP PageWide XL 4000 MFP.
“HP business partner, Neopost Australia, conducted a demo and we clearly saw that the HP PageWide XL 4000 MFP was the only device that would meet all our requirements.
“It was much faster than the other print solutions we looked at. It can produce eight A1 size sheets per minute in either colour or monochrome. The integrated scanner means we can print, scan and copy in one device. The device is simple to use due to its touchscreen interface, which allowed us to navigate and customise the outputs.”
Results
Immediate increase in workflow efficiency
One of the most immediate improvements was the workflow efficiency rate. The HP PageWide XL 4000 MFP eliminated workflow bottlenecks by delivering immediate and high-quality printed output.
Langford says: “The bottlenecks disappeared. The estimating and design teams were no longer competing to have their projects printed. With a 30-second first page print, the drawings were being printed in a quarter of the time it used to take. In fact, the print output for many of our projects is completed in the time for the old printer just to get ready to print the first page.”
“Also, the 100-sheet top stacker is a time and space saver compared to the previous printing device. We no longer need to lay the prints on desks or on the floor for sorting in the correct order; the HP PageWide XL 4000 MFP delivers the prints flat and in the correct sequence.”
Effortless high level of quality and accuracy
The device’s touchscreen reports the printer’s status and enables the user to navigate each screen.
“Our teams find it is an effortless operation. They also receive positive feedback from our clients about the quality of the printed drawings.”
The pigment inks are critical to guarantee accurate and reliable crisp lines, fine detail and smooth grayscales. The HP PageWide XL 4000 MFP does not warm up or apply heat to the paper as part of the printing process, helping it consistently deliver very high levels of line accuracy.
“Time is money, of course. The frustrations, delays and time constraints caused by the bottlenecks because of the slow print output all had a negative bottom line impact. Those are a thing of the past,” Langford added.
“Inevitably there are some technical or teething issues when deploying new technology, but we found HP technical support responsive, knowledgeable and professional.
“Both our estimating and design teams can really concentrate on their important roles of designing and producing the large volume of high quality technical drawings our prospects and customers are demanding,” Langford concluded.
