Whitepapers

"Managed print services" may help companies rein in an insidious expense

image Making copies isn't brain surgery, but at Florida's Health First chain of hospitals it had become what chief information officer Richard Rogers describes as a "convoluted mess." Nursing stations were overrun by copiers, fax machines, and printers, taking up precious counter space and impeding day-to-day operations.

If getting to (or away from) the machines was a chore, so too was keeping them running. There was no consistent process for ordering toner — departments purchased from a range of suppliers, sometimes buying poor-quality reconditioned cartridges. Some nursing units stocked up on a year's supply at a time, others bought on a more ad hoc basis, and no one knew what anyone else had on hand.

Rogers sought a cure in so-called managed print services, a form of outsourcing that addresses the rationalization of office equipment and its maintenance. Lexmark International won the bid, and its consultants set about analyzing document output patterns throughout the company. They replaced many single-function machines with strategically placed multifunction devices that print, copy, scan, and fax. They also rolled out a system that automatically reorders supplies when needed with no hospital-staff involvement. As a result, Rogers says that hard costs alone have dropped from 3.1 cents per image to 1.4 cents per image.

Communicating Better with Color

image Did you hear the one a few years back about the intern who faxed some charts to a team of reviewers in advance of a meeting—with a cover note directing their attention to the figures in green? Quite a faux pas in the days before color faxes. But it’s no joke: Color can be one of the most powerful tools at an organization’s disposal when it comes to organizing information, increasing understanding, and making people and operations more productive and efficient. And today, the technology for color printing to help achieve these ends is more advanced, accessible and affordable than ever.

“If you want to understand how color impacts us, next time you get in the car, take note of how you stop at red and go on green. Color plays a big role in persuasion. We should understand its value.”

–Bryan Eisenberg, ”The Color of Money,” ClickZ Network

Download full whitepaper: Communicating Better with Color

How to Build a Cost-Effective Print, Copy and Fax Solution

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Think about it

An important shift is occurring in the way organizations work with information. To understand the impact of this change we need only to look at our own work habits. When was the last time you printed a document, made a large number of copies of it to share with your colleagues and then filed the original in a filing cabinet? While these practices are not unheard of, they are becoming increasingly uncommon. These days it is far more likely that the business information we require comes to us electronically to be printed and stored as needed. Since it is generally more convenient (and just as economical) to print a smaller number of originals than it is to make copies of a single original, many of us often choose printing over copying.

There is no question that working people are changing their print, copy and fax behaviors. Yet in many organizations the hardware infrastructure that enables these workflows is not keeping pace with the change. For example, if your organization’s printers can’t support regular, small print runs, but you have a high-speed copier that no one is using, it is likely that you are spending too much on copier maintenance and overtaxing your printers.

If It’s Not Broke, Why Fix It?

imageA business case for taking a hard look at aging printing and imaging technology

There has been a significant shift in the way organizations think about the cost and value associated with printing and imaging. In view of the findings of leading industry analysts such as Gartner and IDC (see Fast Facts on page 4), organizations are eager to trim document output costs, which are now estimated at between one and three percent of revenue. Productivity expenditures are thought to be even greater, with IT professionals typically spending up to 15 percent of their time on printing and related issues. These experts and others suggest that savings of as much as 30 percent of overall printing costs can be obtained through active management of the document output environment.

Because it pays to get rightsizing right
A growing majority of companies are turning to rightsizing as a strategy to optimize their document output fleet. It’s a move that is beginning to have a significant impact on fleet size. Yet smaller fleets do not automatically add up to lower management and support costs. The failure lies not in rightsizing as a strategy, but rather in the mistaken way some companies approach its implementation. Lacking a sound life-cycle management plan, such companies steadfastly hang on to document output devices until they are completely inoperable rather than invest in newer technology. Today it is not uncommon to find that as much as 50 percent of the devices in an organization’s printer fleet are more than five years old. Considering that supply costs for older workgroup printers can be as much as twice those for today’s multifunction printers (MFPs), this effort to stretch initial capital investment, and thereby maximize ROI, leaves many organizations spending more, not less. Thanks to recent technological advances, many newer output devices now offer significant savings in supplies and energy costs while enhancing productivity.

Download the full whitepaper: If It's Not Broke, Why Fix It?

Cutting Costs and Maximizing the Return on Your Imaging and Output Assets

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

New, powerful document distribution and management advances place imaging and output resources in an important role within critical business processes. These processes may be vertical, such as brokerage accounts, insurance claims, and FDA drug applications, or horizontal, such as invoicing and HR documentation. As a result of these trends, imaging and output resources are now being included in efforts to align business goals with IT and in efforts to maximize the return on all IT resources.

The process of optimizing the imaging and output infrastructure inevitably reveals unnecessarily high costs and underutilized assets. Indeed, for this White Paper we studied nine large enterprises in the United States, Europe, and Asia and found the majority of organizations studied reported major problems related to overall cost awareness of their imaging hardware, their ability to assess device utilization, and high costs of maintaining an often aged and out-of-date fleet of printers, copiers, and multifunction devices. Based on the experiences of these nine companies and other IDC research, this White Paper looks at the unnecessary costs and inefficiencies that typically exist within these resources and the significant opportunities to achieve cost savings, boost employee productivity, and speed up core business processes from tighter integration between the document advances of hardcopy devices and business process workflows.