Xerox Features City of Mobile in National Ads

Feb 19th, 2002

'We were pretty honored that they lumped us with the customers they did,' says city official Chris Lee

02/19/02
By ANGIE DROBNIC
Business Reporter

The pages of the national publications BusinessWeek and The Economist will feature Mobile's skyline and city government in the coming months as Xerox Corp. unveils ads touting its digital work process solutions.


"Mobile, Ala., grew so fast it needed to streamline city services," the advertisements say. "A Xerox outsourcing team put all their documents on-line, boosting efficiency and lowering costs."

The ads show a snow globe of the Mobile skyline -- including Government Plaza, the Adam's Mark Hotel and the AmSouth Bank Building -- in front of the Xerox logo.

The ads will run in The Economist's Feb. 18 issue, BusinessWeek's April 29 issue and the M.I.T. Technology Review's March issue.

"I think the press is going to be good for the city of Mobile, and of course I think it's going to be good for us," said Fred Woods, the Xerox account executive who urged his company to use Mobile in its ads.

Xerox also plans to run ads that feature private companies such as NBC News, The Gap clothing store, Oracle software and Enterprise Rent-a-Car.

Based in Stamford, Conn., Xerox had sales of $18.7 billion in 2000 and employs 92,500 worldwide.

Xerox chose Mobile for the ads because the city used Xerox to overhaul its document management and the results turned out so well, Woods said.

Chris Lee, the city's executive director of administrative services, said the city started looking for ways to reduce costs and streamline paperwork in 1997 when a Xerox salesman cold-called the city to talk about its copiers. The salesman referred the city to Xerox's business services division, which suggested the city develop its printing needs into a single cost center.

"We realized what a huge cost it was, but it was broken down in so many pieces," Lee said. "We really weren't managing it."

At the time, the city used about 450 forms, 18 letterheads, 18 printed envelopes and various makes and models of copy machines, Lee said.

Xerox cut the forms by 150, narrowed the letterhead down to three, and instituted one uniform mailing label, Lee said. In addition, copiers were standardized, and anyone making more than 30 copies had to send the job to a central print shop.

Finally, forms were made available on the city Web site so people could download them and fill them out at home.

The moves ended up saving the city about $40,000 a year, Lee said.

"Do I ever think we'll go to a paper-less environment? No," he said. "But we can reduce our costs, improve our quality and accelerate our growth in a digital environment."

Lee will give a presentation to the Mobile City Council today about the ad campaign.

"We were pretty honored that they lumped us with the customers they did," Lee said.

The city's next project is upgrading its intranet, the computer system that city departments share. An optimized intranet should rapidly speed up the permitting process for members of the public.

"We're well aware of where the problems are, and we're trying to work them out," Lee said. "We've come a long way, and we've got a long way to go."