What Is The Largest Contributor To Hardcopy Costs?
How a Managed Print Service Partner will help you to reduce cost, improve productivity and protect the environment.
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Zen is perhaps the most annoyingly overused term in modern conversation, but it does have its place. In this case it’s the value of simplicity. In our modern business world, technology has become ubiquitous, and usually it has been purchased in a reactionary manner rather than a carefully executed plan.
This has left many companies with purpose specific devices from many different manufacturers and IT departments mumbling something about new models in a corner. Enter the teachings of Zen. By working with a well informed technology provider and perhaps more importantly your IT department, it is possible to not only drastically simplify your device infrastructure, but drastically improve productivity at the same time.
Let’s examine the facts behind hardcopy fleet cost, productivity, and environmental impact. Doing so will help you to make informed decisions regarding the financial investment of your print and copy devices. By outsourcing and utilizing Managed Print Services you can also positively impact the cost, efficiency, and productivity of your fleet and of your overall organization.
There are four primary drivers of hardcopy cost:
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Having too many devices
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Deploying the devices in an inefficient manner
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Supplies mismanagement
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Sub-optimized services
Point Proven
- According to Photizo Group, a leading industry research firm, perhaps the largest driver of hardcopy costs in most organizations is having too many printing devices. While one device for six workers is considered optimum for most office environments, a study of 105 North American firms found an average of one device for every two knowledge workers.
- Another significant driver of cost is deploying devices that are light-duty which are being used too heavily, or heavy-duty printers which are not being used enough.
By example: A large group of users print volumes of documents to a small local, high cost per page, networked printer, while a higher performance / low cost per page MFP (multifunction printer) device down the hallway sits idle. The price variance between these classes of devices can be as much as 2 cents per page. This may not sound like much until you realize that you could be printing millions of pages per month, and at 2 cents per page, this equates to hundreds of thousands of dollars in operating costs.
- Having suboptimal services: Unlike many other IT infrastructure devices such as servers, hardcopy devices are not purely electronic. They are electro-mechanical, with literally thousands of moving parts. Even though extremely reliable, they occasionally require service and repair. Many organizations simply call local vendors or they subscribe to extended warranty/repair contracts which can be expensive, in order to obtain service for devices when they fail.
- Lastly, supply mismanagement can represent a significant expense at the corporate level. The responsibility for supplies ordering often falls to the administrative assistant closest to the hardcopy device. Lacking proper technical training, they are prone to order the incorrect supplies. Too many uncontrolled departments purchasing and stocking supplies have resulted in closet ‘landfills’ containing toner cartridges which are not actually empty, or have been ordered for the wrong printer.
In their white paper titled “Hidden Assets” Photizo Group details all of the above information plus other inefficiencies that contribute to overspending and high document output costs. View this document
To receive an in-depth analysis of your equipment and to see the many ways you can cut costs and save money, contact DocuSense, your managed print service partner. Complexity Simplified.
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