30 January 2014
Provident is a financial services group specialising in the provision of personal credit products for consumers in the UK non-standard lending market. Its consumer credit division provides smalls cash loans with weekly repayments made via a network of 10,500 locally based agents.
Each agent is given an A5 printed collection list each week. They visit each customer and use the list to keep a record of exactly what payments are being collected against the loan. These printed lists are critical for Provident to keep track of its business.
Every Tuesday, staff at the 300+ Provident regional of offices around the UK collectively print out over 1.2 million A5 sheets. Jan Dawson, office supervisor at the Halifax offices explained how this used to be a real problem: “The old printers were always overheating and jamming and were really slow. You had to stand over them the whole time – right next to the heap of wasted paper on the floor. Sometimes you’d find two or three of us all trying to solve a printer problem. We even went on a course on how to take the old printer to bits in the hope that we could try and fix some issues ourselves.”
Although the company did have a service contract in place, the printers in use were old and parts were increasingly dif cult to get hold of – whether new or recycled. As issues continued to occur, the weekly print run was becoming more and more problematic.
