Activ - Supporting caring families

In 1951, a group of West Australian families living with intellectual disability decided that the care and support given to them was not good enough, and they deserved better. This was the solid foundation that Activ was built on, an organisation that continues to grow and improve the choices and freedom of those living with disability. Activ now supports more than 2,000 individuals and families across nearly 100 sites across Western Australia.

Activ’s Head of Technology outlines some of the challenges the business has faced, and how Canon helped Activ achieve its goals.

Leading with courage

There are many challenges when operating a not-for-profit organisation, one being the allocation of resources. In the disability sector we are required to document a large amount of our services, a process that is achieved via printed forms. This costly and time-consuming demand can threaten the continuity of segments within our operations. As such, we had clear goals to save money and invest in more value-added projects without jeopardising our obligations, and freeing us up to spend more time supporting our customers.

Supporting the Foundation

In a demanding business environment, we required a sustainable solution that would be more cost-efficient while maintaining high quality services. Canon was the most proactive during our contract review process and has continued to partner with us ever since.

We implemented a new fleet of printers across all our sites with a uniFLOW solution that was configured for our industry security requirements and to meet our financial and organisational hierarchies. Canon's service extends to our regional locations and it has been efficient in servicing these more remote locations. It’s a large value-add that not all providers are willing to do.

uniFLOW has provided fantastic reporting and analysis options to identify areas of the business where we can review poor processes and seek efficiencies. It sounds like we are trying to eradicate printing, and to some degree that is true across all businesses, however Canon has come to the table with a number of solutions that will improve our processes and potentially reduce our printing spend (e.g. workflow tools, digitised records scanning solutions, etc). In 18 months we have saved 7.12% on actual printing costs vs savings made by abandoned jobs alone.

This saving in print jobs has now been redirected to provision Wi-Fi to all our customers at all of our sites. This implementation of a collaboration tool has brought our staff closer together, vastly improved our communications with our customers and their families and enabled us to progress more rapidly towards being the technology leader we strive to be within our sector. 

Together we get results

The latest solution has reduced the time taken to print, provided more energy efficiency and increased our print quality. More importantly, it has improved our decision making when it comes to the allocation of costs when reducing the resources required to process financial transactions. As we deal with a lot of sensitive information, the security offered by the uniFLOW Follow Me solution addresses a core requirement in our sector. The greater visibility of our printing costs offered by uniFLOW has resulted in an oversight of the need to print within our business. People now ask themselves, is it really necessary to print that item or is there a cheaper alternative? Canon has helped deliver significant cost reductions to our business. Over the first 18 months, we have saved $10,280 on our printing costs.

As part of the rollout of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), all providers need to be more efficient and achieve cost savings in the delivery of our services (including back office costs). Canon's assistance has enabled us to tick both boxes, which has had a positive effect on our sustainability under this new funding model.