Many executives are looking for meaningful strategies to cut overhead expenses in today’s tough economy. At the same time, they need to find ways to boost productivity and return on assets.
The challenge is that these two goals are usually at odds. Boosting productivity usually requires capital expenditures, while cutting expenses means harming productivity.
Every now and then, a strategy appears that allows you to cut expenses without negatively impacting productivity. This may be possible by optimizing your office-printing environment. At the MPS Group, we do that!
The Growing Impact of Printing
According to the Gartner Group, office printing consumes 1-3 percent of a company’s annual revenue. This means that a $10 million company will spend between $100,000 and $300,000 on document output this year.
On top of the growing costs, most companies have multiple vendors for printer hardware, supplies and repairs. Managing these relationships and processing multiple invoices creates unnecessary costs.
Many companies have no idea what they are spending on office printing. Typically, this is because costs for supplies, service, hardware and support are buried across multiple budget lines.
Environmental Impact
Office printing has a tremendous impact on the environment. The average office employee consumes 10,000 pages of paper per year.
Productivity Impact
Printing affects the productivity of your company. Delivering documents to the correct location at the right time is at the heart of many workflows.
Inefficient, aging printers are prone to breakdown, hampering office effectiveness. The neglect of proper preventative maintenance not only leads to interrupted workflows, it also reduces the usable lifecycle of your printers.
IT Impact
IT departments are impacted by inefficient printing infrastructures. It is estimated that in some organizations, up to 50 percent of help desk calls are related to printers. Since printers are mechanical devices, many of these calls require an IT person to go to the printer.
Often, the problem with the printer is mechanical, meaning the IT person has to call in a third party to repair the device. Multiple brands and models of printers further compound this problem. Creating a strategy to outsource printer management can help you control your IT costs.
Manage Expenses
You cannot manage what you cannot measure. A managed print services strategy should begin with a comprehensive assessment of your current situation. The goal should be to discover the total cost of ownership (TCO) of your office printing. This assessment provides both a baseline to measure improvement and a snapshot of the current situation to uncover improvement opportunities.
Understanding your current situation gives a baseline to work with to contain the growing costs. Your print management strategies can be compared to this benchmark to assess the effectiveness of the program.
Boost Productivity
At the most basic level, employees will face less distraction from printers that are broken or out of toner. Unlike most IT departments, which simply respond to broken systems, a preventative maintenance strategy, combined with an automatic supply-restocking program, ensures your fleet is operating consistently.
Free Up IT Resources
Perhaps the biggest cost savings can be found in a more productive IT department. IT resources are some of the most costly inside a company. It doesn’t make sense to use these resources to fix mechanical devices like printers.
Instead of fielding calls from frustrated users with printer issues, your IT team can focus on core initiatives like security and new software deployments.
A Managed Print Strategy
Deploying a managed print strategy is a logical sequence of events that begins by understanding your current environment and getting it under management. Once the fleet is managed, it makes sense to find ways to optimize the environment on an ongoing basis to continue reducing costs and environmental impact.
Outsource Printer Management
With an understanding of the current volumes, usage patterns and costs, the next logical step is to consider outsourcing the management of your printer fleet.
Optimize Your Fleet
With your printers under management, you could work with your provider on a quarterly basis to review your actual usage and implement recommendations to further optimize your printing infrastructure.
A print management strategy is an effective way to reduce expenses and increase productivity. As such, companies with these objectives should seriously consider implementing strategies to manage their office printing expenses.
Daniel Cantu is vice president of The MPS Group. He has been educating clients on the advantages of a managed print strategy since 2007. For more information about The MPS Group, visit www.thempsgroup-sa.com.
