Last month, it grabbed a £41m seven-year contract to supply print services to car and machinery parts supplier Europart, as well as winning a £25m deal with the NHS in the North West. XGS also made it big in the public sector last August, after securing a £50m contract with the South Yorkshire Strategic Health Authority. However, the biggest coup was a £400m contract with the Department for Work and Pensions. XGS headed up the iON consortium, which includes EDS, Accenture, Remploy and The Stationery Office. It’s XGS’s largest contract to date.

This all means the company is strengthening its presence in the print outsourcing sector. In this year’s PrintWeek print management league table, XGS was in third place behind the two giants of the sector, Williams Lea and RR Donnelley Global Document Solutions. Although XGS competes for similar contracts to these two, European director and general manager Shaun Pantling claims XGS’s scope is wider.

“We do not see ourselves as a print management company, but more of a document management company,” he explains. “Williams Lea and RR Donnelley are very good at what they do, but their strengths are in the UK. We are looking for global clients, as well as those in the UK.”

He adds that XGS is not “overawed” by the other giants in the sector. With the size of the contracts won in the past 12 months alone, it’s not a surprise. At present, XGS accounts for 23% of Xerox’s total European revenue. That is growing all the time, Pantling claims.

XGS is not only a relatively new player in the outsourcing market, but also within the organisation itself. XGS was established in Europe, at a headquarters level, at the beginning of 2004 and at a country level, at the start of 2005. XGS merged two formerly separate groups: Xerox Business Services, the company’s document outsourcing and facilities management business, and Xerox Industry Solutions and Services, the company’s consultancy business.

Productive partnership
Since then, it has become an estimated £200m-turnover division, with clients including Barclays, HSBC, British Aerospace and Ducati. The contract with the famous Italian motorcycle brand is one XGS cites to show it’s potential.
Ducati and XGS came together in 2005, as part of a five-year deal. XGS began by analysing Ducati’s office and print equipment at its headquarters in Bologna. Its radical solution was to cut the number of machines by 70%, helping to reduce the cost of ownership and make the company more efficient.

But it’s the management of Ducati’s documents that XGS believes is the key to the contract. XGS reorganised the way Ducati’s technical manuals and booklets were printed. The documents are ordered on a just-in-time basis instead of ordering a massive bulk of documents, which can cause storage issues.

“Once every 24 hours, we inform Xerox of the latest product we have sold,” explains Silvia Frova, assistant operations director at Ducati. “We send them information like the bike model and the country where it will be sent to. They handle the production of the document and it’s shipped with the bike.”

Pantling argues that the just-in-time service is a vital part of the contract for all its clients. “For example, in the financial services sector there are often changes in regulations or interest rate information. Every time something like that happens, there is a large swathe of documents that become unusable.”

Meeting demand
The in-time model means organisations are increasingly relying on XGS, and others in the sector, to manage their documents. It frees companies to focus on their core business. Larger organisations in both the private and public sector are beginning to analyse how much of their revenue is spent on documents – according to Pantling it’s around 5-15%.

“More and more organisations are waking up to the cost of their documents,” adds Pantling. “When we started, we thought there would be a dividing line between public and private. But I don’t think that’s the case. People in the public sector have a focus on real value; they are very careful on how they spend their money.”

It’s still a young division, but the signs are that XGS is punching above its weight in the print outsourcing market and picking up eye-catching contracts in both the private and public sector. If more organisations continue the trend of outsourcing their document management, XGS could be well placed to gain more lucrative deals.

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XGS Factfile
Launched In 2004 as a result of a merger between Xerox Business Services, the company’s document outsourcing and facilities management business, and Xerox Industry Solutions and Services, the company’s consultancy business

Based Uxbridge, and also part of Xerox Europe, which has operations in 17 countries and a workforce of 14,000

Clients Department for Work and Pensions, Ducati, Barclays, Europart, Bouygues Telecom, HSBC and Lloyds TSB

Sectors Three areas: Business Process Services; Office Services; Document Outsourcing and Communication Services