AGOSI (General gold and silver refinery)

The purchasing department’s team of four is in charge of 1,200 suppliers and places about 10,000 orders per year. They are acquiring manufacturing materials, investment-products, energy, services as well as hard- and software.

Holger Scharsich is head of the department and has been with Agosi for more than six years. When he joined the company, they had about 80 to 100 printers and multifunctional devices. These were serviced by three different providers. Two of the contracts were including maintenance, but no consumable materials, therefore Holger Scharsich was purchasing these separately.

„It was very complex and inefficient to have three different sources for maintenance and service of the devices. Hence we were looking at streamlining our device environment to achieve a better and simpler structure and a better overview. Another goal was reduction of stock-keeping, which had gotten somewhat out of hand. Lack of clear organization regarding stock products often caused several employees to place orders for the same products, while these orders were still not covering our actual demands, thus causing frustration with users. We had to redefine our work processes and wanted to automate some of them. Today there is a multitude of options available in terms of automatization and digitalisation and I wanted to take advantage of these.“ explains Holger Scharsich.

In addition there were parameters given by management, requiring exclusive use of HP devices. Thus Agosi was on a quest for an IT-service-partner capable of assisting us in developing a stragegy and then implementing it: from acquistion of the devices to provision of software products pertaining to automatization and digitalization in the area of document- and device-management.

“At the time Topcart was aleady one of three providers, taking care of service and maintenance for a few of our devices and striving to achieve a closer collaboration. Our contact person developed a strategy for standardization of our device environment with just a few different models. We assigned a specific device to each of the various sets of user requrirements, thus we can tell exactly which devices are in use in our different departments.“ says Holger Scharsich.

 The overall concept with our own contact person, a device stragegy, full warranty for the devices and addtional software products convinced Agosi in favor of a collaboration with Topcart. The managed print service package includes a full warranty, encompassing all technical service, maintenance and any replacement- and consumable parts. Defective devices, where a repair turns out to be uneconomical, get replaced by new devices free of charge,

 “We use Topcart toner and thus are receiving a full-service-package, including maintenance, technical service calls as well as replacement and disposal. There are neither minimum order amounts nor subsequent billing, allowing us to predict our costs very precisely.“ says Holger Scharsich.

For purposes of monitoring toner levels and SAP-ordering processes Holger Scharsich uses a manufacturer-independent printer-control-software, displaying a summary of all network devices and their pertaining data, such as for example page numbers, status, toner- and paper fill-levels. If a trigger level happens to be too low, the software automatically sends a notification to the user as well.