Increasing Equipment Reliability

Chapman and Cutler LLP is a leading Chicago-based law firm focused on innovative and practical legal solutions for complex financial transactions. In addition to traditional financing, the firm, with its pool of 180 attorneys located in three offices, is widely recognized for its experience in specialized areas of finance. Keeping up with the pace of change in the financial arena as well as the rapidly evolving needs of Chapman and Cutler's clients, has consistently challenged our IT group to provide the Chapman user community with the most up-to-date and efficient technology solutions. This was our plan last summer when we set out to replace and upgrade our firm's cost recovery systems.

Assessing Technology Requirements

While technology has progressed tremendously over the past decade, nowhere has this been more evident than within the complex financial transaction work in which Chapman and Cutler specializes. While we used to copy millions of pages a month and send out hundreds of overnight mail packages a day, current copying rates have dropped to a few hundred thousand pages, replaced by thousands of e-mails per day and “scan to PDF and print” jobs totaling millions of pages. With these advances in technology have come heightened client expectations to complete work in minutes or hours, rather than days. This means our equipment has to be very reliable and easy to use, allowing the attorneys to spend their available time focused on legal work, not on mechanical problems with scanners, copiers and printers.

Reliability is Key

It is this primary business concern of technology and equipment reliability that led us down the path of reevaluating our cost recovery configuration for our newly acquired fleet of Canon 6750 multi-functional devices (MFDs), including 22 MFDs that support PDF scanning, which provided an aggregate scanning capacity of about 1500 pages per minute, a substantial increase over past devices. While the firm has generally been a “early adopter” of technology; we introduced first generation multi-function equipment 14 years ago, and rolled out an all digital copier/printer fleet in 1999, the burgeoning needs of our staff and their clients' required regular equipment upgrades, especially for PDF scanner technology. In order to meet these scanning demands, we needed to add another PC box to the back of our Canon multifunction devices. Including external devices for the eCopy solution, the Canon Fiery image processor and our Equitrac cost recovery system with its own separate proprietary network and wiring, we had three external boxes, transforming each copy area into a computer room with a nest of cables and boxes. Of course, all those exposed boxes and cables meant reduced reliability. Based on the time sensitivities of the firm's financial transaction work, high reliability has become a Chapman and Cutler specialty with 24/7 Support. For example, we had no downtime in our e-mail and DMS systems at all last year, and only had a few hours of downtime over the last 5 years, delivering 6 Sigmas, or 99.9999% reliability. Compared to this performance, the reliability of our first generation PDF scanning multifunction devices was laughable. They ran well enough to be usable, but attorneys and staff often had to hike between floors to find a working scanner. With our upgrade to new copier/printers and cost recovery we were determined to correct this situation.

Beyond reliability, the biggest issues with the existing setup were related to the technical support required to maintain the cost recovery hardware devices and unreasonably long problem resolution times. In fact, prior to exploring an embedded, software-centric solution such as nQueue, it was not uncommon for problem resolution times of our chargeback system to extend for days or even a week. While problems with the cost recovery system did not always incapacitate the Canon device, getting charges into our accounting system was sometimes delayed for long periods. With the propensity for the financial transactions that are our specialty to bill at closing, delayed cost recovery information generally means a complete loss of the revenue.

Cost Recovery Selection

During the selection process, a joint project between our IT and Office Services groups, we initially assumed our cost recovery options would be limited to the same relatively unchanged solutions we have chosen among for years: The usual vendors providing the usual hardware-centric, proprietary options. Relatively late in the game, during the selection among the final three vendors for the outsourcing contract including the MFD devices, we became aware that nQueue had a recently released product that could solve a number of these problems for us with fresh approaches. While we were a little concerned about proposing such a major change only a few weeks from implementation, the nQueue sales and technical team were confident in their product and their ability to implement. Not only where they able to turnaround the proposal, address all technical specifications, and pricing, within a matter of days, but more importantly, they brought to the table a well established partnership with eCopy, our vendor of choice for the PDF scanning component. Together, nQueue and eCopy partnered to provide exactly what we wanted; a software-based, integrated cost recovery solution that would help us meet our efficiency and reliability goals, while reducing our reliance on proprietary hardware and constant external IT support.

A Winning Combination

nQueue, eCopy and Canon delivered with their embedded solutions which could run on the processor and display screen built into the firm's Canon Image Runner copier/printer/scanner machines. While at first glance it seemed ideal to have all this new functionality without any external boxes or wires, upon testing, we discovered that a completely embedded solution was not quite perfect for our firm. With our focus on the “scanning to PDF” process, our users type in substantive document information (we import the PDFs right into our DMS so they become part of the electronic matter record even when emailing the documents right to clients). We found that the smaller copier touch screens limited our users' ability to impute full document descriptions. Happily, eCopy has an external screen and full size keyboard option to speed up this input, and nQueue provided the option to embed in the eCopy screen and keyboard rather than the small Canon touch display. For the few color copiers and some fax machines without eCopy, nQueue also provided a Tablet PC option that our users have appreciated. Beyond getting rid of all that hardware (a total of 52 external boxes!), the embedded nQueue solution now uses the same TCP/IP LAN as all of our PCs and IP phones, eliminating the extra cost of installing and maintaining the separate proprietary network of our former cost recovery solution, and eliminating an entire class of failures and outages.

Model for the Future

While often the best technology innovations seem obvious in retrospect, in this case imbedding the cost recovery inside the machine being tracked, it usually takes a new company, like nQueue, to embrace the future in this way. While we only have about 6 months of experience on the new system so far, it looks like we have realized all of our major goals in the cost recovery upgrade:

• Fast implementation: With only 2.5 weeks between the final implementation decision and the install date, the nQueue services team got Chapman and Cutler up and running on time ' a very impressive feat considering we upgraded our entire fleet of 31 Cannon MFDs with a mix of eCopy embedded software and nQueue tablets on the six machines without eCopy;
• Fast problem response times: Minor problems that showed up in the install have subsequently been handled very fast. Compared to our former cost recovery vendors, problems have been fewer and have been handled more promptly;
• Overall reliability: The embedded nQueue along with more mature software versions from eCopy and Canon contributed to a significant increase in overall MFD functional reliability; and
• Lower total cost of ownership: With the external proprietary boxes eliminated from most MFD machines, our FM vendor saved money on the product acquisition that they passed on to us with a reduced monthly fee. With the elimination of the proprietary wiring, we have saved staff time on installs and trouble shooting and the cost of moving one of our offices to a new building was reduced this fall by the elimination of wiring, modem lines and special buffer hardware in that office associated with the old cost recovery system.

Chapman and Cutler LLP is a leading Chicago-based law firm focused on innovative and practical legal solutions for complex financial transactions. In addition to traditional financing, the firm, with its pool of 180 attorneys located in three offices, is widely recognized for its experience in specialized areas of finance. Keeping up with the pace of change in the financial arena as well as the rapidly evolving needs of Chapman and Cutler's clients, has consistently challenged our IT group to provide the Chapman user community with the most up-to-date and efficient technology solutions. This was our plan last summer when we set out to replace and upgrade our firm's cost recovery systems.

Assessing Technology Requirements

While technology has progressed tremendously over the past decade, nowhere has this been more evident than within the complex financial transaction work in which Chapman and Cutler specializes. While we used to copy millions of pages a month and send out hundreds of overnight mail packages a day, current copying rates have dropped to a few hundred thousand pages, replaced by thousands of e-mails per day and “scan to PDF and print” jobs totaling millions of pages. With these advances in technology have come heightened client expectations to complete work in minutes or hours, rather than days. This means our equipment has to be very reliable and easy to use, allowing the attorneys to spend their available time focused on legal work, not on mechanical problems with scanners, copiers and printers.

Reliability is Key

It is this primary business concern of technology and equipment reliability that led us down the path of reevaluating our cost recovery configuration for our newly acquired fleet of Canon 6750 multi-functional devices (MFDs), including 22 MFDs that support PDF scanning, which provided an aggregate scanning capacity of about 1500 pages per minute, a substantial increase over past devices. While the firm has generally been a “early adopter” of technology; we introduced first generation multi-function equipment 14 years ago, and rolled out an all digital copier/printer fleet in 1999, the burgeoning needs of our staff and their clients' required regular equipment upgrades, especially for PDF scanner technology. In order to meet these scanning demands, we needed to add another PC box to the back of our Canon multifunction devices. Including external devices for the eCopy solution, the Canon Fiery image processor and our Equitrac cost recovery system with its own separate proprietary network and wiring, we had three external boxes, transforming each copy area into a computer room with a nest of cables and boxes. Of course, all those exposed boxes and cables meant reduced reliability. Based on the time sensitivities of the firm's financial transaction work, high reliability has become a Chapman and Cutler specialty with 24/7 Support. For example, we had no downtime in our e-mail and DMS systems at all last year, and only had a few hours of downtime over the last 5 years, delivering 6 Sigmas, or 99.9999% reliability. Compared to this performance, the reliability of our first generation PDF scanning multifunction devices was laughable. They ran well enough to be usable, but attorneys and staff often had to hike between floors to find a working scanner. With our upgrade to new copier/printers and cost recovery we were determined to correct this situation.

Beyond reliability, the biggest issues with the existing setup were related to the technical support required to maintain the cost recovery hardware devices and unreasonably long problem resolution times. In fact, prior to exploring an embedded, software-centric solution such as nQueue, it was not uncommon for problem resolution times of our chargeback system to extend for days or even a week. While problems with the cost recovery system did not always incapacitate the Canon device, getting charges into our accounting system was sometimes delayed for long periods. With the propensity for the financial transactions that are our specialty to bill at closing, delayed cost recovery information generally means a complete loss of the revenue.

Cost Recovery Selection

During the selection process, a joint project between our IT and Office Services groups, we initially assumed our cost recovery options would be limited to the same relatively unchanged solutions we have chosen among for years: The usual vendors providing the usual hardware-centric, proprietary options. Relatively late in the game, during the selection among the final three vendors for the outsourcing contract including the MFD devices, we became aware that nQueue had a recently released product that could solve a number of these problems for us with fresh approaches. While we were a little concerned about proposing such a major change only a few weeks from implementation, the nQueue sales and technical team were confident in their product and their ability to implement. Not only where they able to turnaround the proposal, address all technical specifications, and pricing, within a matter of days, but more importantly, they brought to the table a well established partnership with eCopy, our vendor of choice for the PDF scanning component. Together, nQueue and eCopy partnered to provide exactly what we wanted; a software-based, integrated cost recovery solution that would help us meet our efficiency and reliability goals, while reducing our reliance on proprietary hardware and constant external IT support.

A Winning Combination

nQueue, eCopy and Canon delivered with their embedded solutions which could run on the processor and display screen built into the firm's Canon Image Runner copier/printer/scanner machines. While at first glance it seemed ideal to have all this new functionality without any external boxes or wires, upon testing, we discovered that a completely embedded solution was not quite perfect for our firm. With our focus on the “scanning to PDF” process, our users type in substantive document information (we import the PDFs right into our DMS so they become part of the electronic matter record even when emailing the documents right to clients). We found that the smaller copier touch screens limited our users' ability to impute full document descriptions. Happily, eCopy has an external screen and full size keyboard option to speed up this input, and nQueue provided the option to embed in the eCopy screen and keyboard rather than the small Canon touch display. For the few color copiers and some fax machines without eCopy, nQueue also provided a Tablet PC option that our users have appreciated. Beyond getting rid of all that hardware (a total of 52 external boxes!), the embedded nQueue solution now uses the same TCP/IP LAN as all of our PCs and IP phones, eliminating the extra cost of installing and maintaining the separate proprietary network of our former cost recovery solution, and eliminating an entire class of failures and outages.

Model for the Future

While often the best technology innovations seem obvious in retrospect, in this case imbedding the cost recovery inside the machine being tracked, it usually takes a new company, like nQueue, to embrace the future in this way. While we only have about 6 months of experience on the new system so far, it looks like we have realized all of our major goals in the cost recovery upgrade:

• Fast implementation: With only 2.5 weeks between the final implementation decision and the install date, the nQueue services team got Chapman and Cutler up and running on time ' a very impressive feat considering we upgraded our entire fleet of 31 Cannon MFDs with a mix of eCopy embedded software and nQueue tablets on the six machines without eCopy;
• Fast problem response times: Minor problems that showed up in the install have subsequently been handled very fast. Compared to our former cost recovery vendors, problems have been fewer and have been handled more promptly;
• Overall reliability: The embedded nQueue along with more mature software versions from eCopy and Canon contributed to a significant increase in overall MFD functional reliability; and
• Lower total cost of ownership: With the external proprietary boxes eliminated from most MFD machines, our FM vendor saved money on the product acquisition that they passed on to us with a reduced monthly fee. With the elimination of the proprietary wiring, we have saved staff time on installs and trouble shooting and the cost of moving one of our offices to a new building was reduced this fall by the elimination of wiring, modem lines and special buffer hardware in that office associated with the old cost recovery system.