Universal Music is the world’s number one music company, representing artists such as U2, Amy Winehouse, The Sugababes, The Kaiser Chiefs and Scissor Sisters. The company moved into a former multi-storey car park in High Street Kensington, London last year, which was converted into a multi-million pound modern, funky office space.

This enabled the 400 employees from the various record labels, UMTV and the core business functions to be located together for the first time. The interior suits the ‘rock and roll’ image of the music business and the main record labels - Polydor, Mercury and Island Records - each has its own floor, decorated and styled to suit the brands and personalities. 

Previously, Universal Music offices were spread across about five sites in West London and this move gave them the opportunity to look at new technology. As Adrian Lee, UK Purchasing Manager for Universal Music explains: “We reviewed our printing and copying requirements to work out how we could best service the staff working across each floor. The design of the building is such that there is a central resource area on each floor, with a post room, message centre, etc., and this seemed the ideal place to locate a multifunctional product (mfp). These can print, scan, copy and fax and are accessible to all the staff via the network. With one colour and one mono mfp at each resource centre, faster more cost-effective printing is available to everyone.”

As the move was staged over a period of five to six months, some desktop printers moved in with their users. As Adrian says: “We haven’t managed to migrate as much of the print volume over to the mfps as we had anticipated but we are still seeing a big cost differential with respect to colour printing. We can see the practical benefits of faster colour printing and copying to size A3 as well as the ease of enlarging documents and scanning. I think we will be using the scanning function much more in the future and think that the Scan to folder feature will be really useful.”

Universal Music has also purchased some specialist colour machines for the larger music labels which are used for colour layout proofing. Adrian adds: “These are much cheaper and faster than higher spec colour printers but produce good quality output.”

Adrian continued: “We did quite a lot of analysis before the move and calculated the cost savings on the basis of migrating 50% of print from desktop printers to mfps. We have achieved this in some areas, but not all. I think that we will be able to achieve it over time as the staff become trained on the mfps and the printers reach the end of their lives. We’re now looking at an mfp strategy at other sites, we’re not going to buy any more printers.”

Adrian concluded: “NRG project-managed the installation of the new equipment very well under difficult circumstances. The move to the new building was done in stages, as each floor was completed, and usually took place over a weekend. The planned moving dates became a movable feast but NRG was very flexible and accommodating, holding equipment for us if necessary and delivering it when it was finally required.”