Print Assessment: Impact on Your Bottom Line
- Surveys have shown that few businesses know how much it costs to own and run printers, even fewer large companies have a clear understanding of the true cost of ownership.
- Industry estimates the full cost of printing at up to 3 percent of a company's annual revenue.
- An optimised print environment could save your organisation between 13 and 40 percent in direct costs.
- Print Assessment reveals how to achieve this reducing costs by 23 percent on average. Savings that go directly on to the bottom line.
- Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Analysis
- Cost Containment and Recovery
- Defined Strategic Recommendations
"Image Runner were able to demonstrate a clear understanding of our existing situation, both the positive and negative aspects; the net result was not only considerable financial savings but a 100% increase in productivity and efficiency across all our offices."
S. Crathern, Director, PSP Homes
Contents
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1. What is the true cost of print ?
The promise of the paperless office has been replaced with a greater reliance on printed documents.
The prevalence of e-mails, web pages, presentations and PDF documents is prompting employees to print more than ever before.
The enterprise print environment is often a misunderstood cost centre that is much more expensive than most businesses recognise.
Many enterprises do not realise exactly how many printers, copiers and fax machines are deployed, and thus have no clear understanding of the total cost of print.
To get a firm grasp on the costs of printing, companies are turning to
comprehensive print assessment services that analyse the current print environment and reveal ways the enterprise can dramatically reduce costs.
2. What is driving the need for print assessment ?
According to Forrester Research:
“Few companies know what it really costs to print, fax and copy documents each year, and fewer still are actively managing those costs."
"Conservative industry estimates place the full cost of printing at up to 3 percent of a company's annual revenue."
"It is not uncommon for each employee in a large corporation to average 1,200 printed pages monthly, at a cost of £400 per employee each year."
IDC explains:
“After years of inattention and lack of coordinated management, the imaging and output infrastructure in most enterprises is fraught with high costs."
” Millions of printers purchased in the 1990s are still being used in the workplace. Older print devices share common problems: long wait times, low paper capacity and poor performance. The cost of maintaining old printers is significantly more than modern alternatives. The price for parts and toner becomes incrementally more expensive over time and it is more time-consuming to manage devices that lack network management capabilities.
The costs of print generally fall into three categories:
- Hardware: This cost includes the acquisition of print technology and upgrades.
- Consumables: This includes operational costs such as toner, drums, ink, paper and electricity consumption.
- Support: Support costs include maintenance contracts, help desk calls and service calls.
According to Forrester Research:
"Service calls for devices without maintenance contracts can easily cost more than £100 per call.
Surprisingly, hardware costs make up only five percent of the total cost of print ownership. Consumables and support are typically seven times more expensive than the initial investment in print technology.
3. What is print assessment ?
To understand the necessary steps for controlling the cost of print in the enterprise, companies are turning to service providers that can perform a comprehensive examination of their existing print environment. Commonly referred to as print assessment, the service entails a thorough review of all print devices within the enterprise. Print assessment reveals how an enterprise can optimise its print environment, reducing costs by 23 percent on average
Identifying Opportunities for Optimisation
Print assessment provides high-level decision makers the necessary information to make tactical cost-cutting decisions. The service provides a foundation for reducing the total lifecycle cost of print devices. A complete print assessment provides enterprises the critical blueprints necessary to retrofit the print infrastructure with fewer print devices that can perform multiple functions such as printing, scanning and copying.
Removing Costs with Consolidation
Print assessment is the essential first step to optimising the print environment that has an end goal of balanced deployment. In this optimised environment, businesses have technologies and tools deployed where they can achieve the best utilisations. Plus, a major part of optimising the print environment is taking the assets a business already has and putting them to better use. For example, a company could achieve their output requirements with 300 rather than 500 printers—and 100 of those printers could be assets they already own. In this case upgrading equates to better utilisation.
Consolidation offers more opportunities for cost savings. Through the effective use of multitasking or multifunction devices, companies can trim the number of devices in use. Print environment ROI starts with the basics. Consolidating and simplifying the environment or reducing the number of devices to manage will definitely remove costs from the operation.
4. How it works
Print assessment begins with an inventory of all print devices in the network. This task is typically automated using powerful software tools that discover print devices and perform usage evaluations. These applications are able to determine the number of printed pages delivered by each device, over time. A more comprehensive option includes the manual examination of all desktop-attached printers that are not connected to the network.
Intelligent analysis is performed to:
- Identify locations that are underutilised
- Determine the costs of consumables such as toner, ink, paper and power use
- Identify operating costs for existing devices
- Predict costs for service and device management
- Determine employee productivity impact
Soft cost analysis includes:
- Floor space cost assessment
- Average help desk cost savings
- Supplies management reductions in both acquisition and labor savings (minutes saved to replace cartridges)
Print assessment includes workflow monitoring and analysis to determine if multiple older printers can be consolidated to fewer, more powerful print devices. Locations within the company are examined and the total monthly cost and average cost per page are provided, delineated by location or department. In addition, newer devices that do not need replacement are identified.
After the total cost of print is determined, a recommended list of replacement products is identified. The related costs of the new devices are compared to the existing environment to reveal the total savings. Part of the assessment includes a consolidation plan to departmentally reduce the number of printers to fewer, faster devices and intelligently redeploy existing assets.
5. The benefits
The primary benefit of print assessment is the potential cost savings of consolidating the print infrastructure. Analysis performed by IDC revealed that an optimised print environment could save mid- to large-sized organisations between 13 and 40 percent in direct costs, with the average company achieving a 23 percent reduction in costs.
The report concluded that:
- The largest savings were in IT support costs
- Help desk calls for print-related topics were reduced by more than 50 percent
- The cost of consumables decreased
- Device availability increased
- Document workflow improved with the use of multifunction devices
Additional benefits of print assessment include:
- Reveals if maintaining existing equipment is more costly than new investments
- Identifies ways to reduce costs and streamline workflows
- Allows the enterprise to justify the consolidation of printers
- Identifies inefficient technology that can be replaced with higher-performing and more energy-efficient devices
- Helps understand how productivity can improve with faster queue and print times
- Reveals how security can be enhanced with print technology that requires user pass codes before printing documents
- Opens the enterprise to the opportunity to centralise print queues, enabling a user to receive a print job from any printer on the network by simply entering a code
- Simplifies management with newer efficient ink and larger paper capacities
- Enables volume purchase agreements for consumables via standardisation
- Reveals how costs can be better allocated departmentally with print metering