The customers on today’s panel represented a wide range of printing environments, but they all had one thing in common – they are living and breathing Print 2.0. The attendees included Matthew Campbell, Adcorp Holdings; Rodney Gooch, Castle Combe Racing School; Charles Page, Imperial College, London; Martin Thorburn, Barkham Office Furniture; and Malek Zanzouri, 3M.

3M has a fantastic case study and is the epitome of Print 2.0 thinking. I had a chance to sit down with 3M’s Peter Godfrey for a podcast to talk about the benefits and ROI 3M realized by working with HP. Through an HP Managed Print Services agreement, 3M has reduced its device count by 47 percent globally, and saved more than $3 million in two years in the U.S. alone.

Barkham Office Furniture, a business dealing in new and second hand office furniture, had an interesting problem to solve. Because their inventory changes so frequently, creating catalogs for customers was a challenge. HP created a solution consisting of templates for an e-catalog, print-on-demand, and email options for informing the customer of Barkham’s inventory. Because documents are printed on an ad hoc basis, Barkham Office Furniture improved efficiency by being able to change or create content without delay.

Imperial College, London, a University in the UK, is a community of more than 20,000 faculty, staff and students. Three years ago, each department had its own model of printer, own accounting methods, etc. HP worked with Imperial College and offered a Managed Print Services contract, which solved a few challenges in that Imperial College was able to upgrade an aging and disparate printer fleet with a modern, standardized fleet. Now, students can go to any device – at any of Imperial College’s campuses - and print jobs on demand. Not only is this convenient, but it also helps to reduce waste, since jobs don’t sit in the output bin waiting to be picked up.

Not only that, Imperial College’s fleet is self funding and the availability of pull printing reduces waste. One of the partners in our HP Business Solutions Partner Program, Safecom, was a critical element in enabling the solution for pull printing.

Castle Combe is a motor racing circuit outside London that offers a racing school and has a fantastic in-house marketing solution. Because content intended for customers can be customized, Castle Combe is able to create brochures and information on-demand for each of its customers, which eliminates the need to keep a supply of pre-printed brochures in stock, which can go out of date and need to be recycled. Using an HP Color LaserJet 5550 as part of their overall solution, Castle Combe prints marketing materials on demand, and tailors responses to particular client requirements.

Adcorp Holdings is a flexible staffing firm in South Africa. Through HP partner Bromide, who is delivering managed printing services, Adcorp was able to be billed based on the number of pages they printed, in addition to improving workflow. There are more than 65,000 employees of Adcorp and many of the timeslips that are filed weekly are scanned to email for sending, instead of being delivered by fax or by courier.

It’s been exciting to hear HP customers’ achievements first-hand. More to come tomorrow so stay tuned!