Printing costs are out of control
Ditch your rickety old printers and spare your budget.
As much as you'd like to believe that office printers are going the way of the typewriter and the telegraph, the number of pages printed between 1995 and 2005 will more than double, according to Xplor International, a company that studies electronic document systems.
Hard-copy output costs from 1 to 3 percent of a company's total revenue, according to printing company Lexmark International. That means a $1 billion company spends $10 million to $30 million a year on printing. Expenses don't end there. Printing-related help desk calls make up 10 to 50 percent of the user traffic that crosses your IT manager's desk, according to Gartner.
When the Medicaid division of the state of Mississippi approached Lexmark about changing its cumbersome purchasing and payment processes, its 600 employees were hardly working in a paperless office. The division spent a lot of time and most of its $2.6 billion budget on processing health claimsâ€"on a rickety old dot-matrix printer. The aging machine had become not only slow, but difficult to run, says Terry Childress (pictured), director of information services for the agency. "We made the decision to change," Childress says.
Lexmark devised a simple solution. Outfitting the agency with a new colour laser printer with a copier/scanner add-on reduced output costs by up to 20 percent, the printer maker estimates.
The division now stores almost all of its forms electronicallyâ€"some on a central server, and some on the printers as templatesâ€"and employees download them from the intranet. Rather than stocking paper copies that must be discarded every time forms change, employees print them only as needed and make fast changes and updates online. And instead of sending a courier to deliver files, Childress just scans information and sends an electronic version via email in minutes.
How do you go about cutting your printing costs? Job number one: Standardise equipment. "If you've got a different fax, printer, and copier in every department, you're buying different toners, panels, and manuals," says Brad Patten, president of BitWits, an IT outsourcing company.
Patten concedes that you may be tempted to save money by buying whatever printing equipment is on sale. But, he warns, "it's very expensive to maintain a mishmash of systems. The drivers are different, the look and feel and operations may be different. The more you standardise, the more people in the office can help each other, which lowers the cost of hiring people like me." It also saves in training and support costs.
On the other hand, the most efficient upgrade for many printers is retirement. Kevin Spinks, US marketing director for Lexmark's Business Printer Division, says that people ought to be printing less. "I can't think of a business process that doesn't contain information on a piece of paper. Instead of sending paper by FedEx, companies ought to put paper documents back into an electronic system."
Spinks suggests that several strategically placed multifunction devices can replace the typical junk-lot of printers, copiers, fax machines, and scanners. The cost savings can be enormous. "I'm talking about a 15ppm laser that you can attach a scanner to for less than $2,000â€"total. This way, a workgroup has access to a device that sits on the network and acts as a fax, printer, scanner, and copier.
