In managing logistics across such a large territory, with many product lines and customers, printing plays a critical role, especially when producing invoices from the company’s ERP systems. Key challenges involve facilitating collaboration between peers in a workforce that is geographically distributed, and between different parts of the business and participants in its supply chain. Scanning is an essential capability, too, as a long-standing drive to increase sustainability—CCHBC was named a leader in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index back in 2014—leads it to digitise much of its workflow around documents.

The firm looks for high uptime from the service-level agreements offered by its vendors, and wanted to create a consistent experience for staff who use and manage printers across all the territories it operates in, from Greece to Nigeria, while establishing cost-effective economies of scale.

The process arrived at an optimised printing environment where the organisation had just those devices it needed to do the job and no more, supported by a range of services—including a cloud-printing solution, MyQ, implemented by Kyocera—that enabled features like ID-based access, scan-to-email, and faxing for those who need it.

Another important part of the choice to go with Kyocera was the ability to transform the current printing environment to be cloud-based in future. CCHBC won’t have to install or maintain additional infrastructure to make the change, which is currently work in progress. Rather, Kyocera is assuming all responsibility for this domain, making it a “lift and shift” task for their client to move print management to the cloud.

Mr Koutromanos tells how the decommissioning of some office space during a covid-19 lockdown left ten devices stranded. Kyocera itself organised for the machines to be removed and redeployed at other facilities so there was zero financial impact for CCHBC, which discovered that Kyocera even has the capability to co-ordinate moving devices between countries if required, taking care of all the complicated logistics.

Kyocera showed its flexibility again by reaching a mutually agreeable solution when currency fluctuations in Nigeria made the cost of its printing solutions an issue for CCHBC’s local organisation. That accommodation from Kyocera gives Mr Koutromanos confidence that the two firms will be able to tackle future challenges and transformations together.

Though achieving greater sustainability is an ethical imperative, it is also part of how CCHBC is engaging a workforce that Mr Koutromanos acknowledges now has greater expectations of empathy, flexibility and purpose than it did before covid-19. Creating a workplace that demonstrates sustainability is part of satisfying those expectations so that workers can feel more invested in what they do. “When you manage to get people working with you, they are always more productive than if they are working for you,” he says.

With many of its pandemic and printer-related challenges out of the way, CCHBC is embarking on a new phase of its life in the era of hybrid work. “People are still adapting new ways of being productive, being creative and driving impact,” Mr Koutromanos says. He connects the feeling he has today to the experience of recently seeing his son start school for another year. “This year the kids were free, and it was like a fresh start,” he says.