Catering to some 54 million passengers every year, Frankfurt Airport is the eighth busiest airport in the world. Every aspect of its management and operation is overseen by Fraport AG.

About 70,000 people work in the airport's many buildings and operating facilities. With a large zone of operation, many employees take a mobile computer along with them as they go about their work. This is a workplace with demanding information-management needs, and the company's printer system is scattered throughout the offices of each department. In the past, this meant that even if a printer was close at hand, an employee may have had to travel more than a kilometer back to his or her own office just to find a printer that could actually be used. To solve this problem, Fraport went looking for someone who could build a system that both reconciles the seemingly contradictory requirements of security and convenience while keeping waste to an absolute minimum. Fraport chose Canon as its partner in this venture.

Fraport started by establishing "print points" in more than 300 locations around the airport, equipping them with Canon office network multifunction devices. Canon customized printer management software for Fraport that enables any one of 20,000 employees access to the nearest "print point" where they can freely print, copy, fax, and even scan and deliver documents to their own computer simply by entering their password. The new system makes it possible to accurately charge the printing costs of each department on the basis of actual usage. Thanks to centralized management, the result is far fewer printers and much lower running costs.

With the addition of this streamlined, smart printer system, one more hurdle in development has been overcome for the ever expanding Frankfurt Airport.