Lexmark International Group Inc, the Lexington Kentucky one-time IBM Corp printer company claims that between 10% and 15% of a company’s overall revenue is spent on printing and its related costs, despite the so-called era of the paperless office. This includes the printing of documents from a computer, as well as photocopying and fax messages. It concluded that paper consumption is in fact increasing rather than diminshing. The company’s solutions and connectivity European marketing manager Jean-Louis De La Salle says the growth of electronic mail has escalated this problem, because some 90% of people connected to the internet print out their email messages. Lexmark, which has just reported year end revenues of $2.49bn (CI No 3,334), is looking to diversify away from simply dealing with the hardware side of the business and towards services and management. De La Salle said: We want don’t want to be just a hardware vendor because the hardware will change. And Lexmark thinks it is onto something with the identification of printing related costs. In a local area network printing environment, hardware accounts for 5% of the cost, while resources such as paper, toner and power account for 45%. 50% is generated from hidden costs, such as colleagues helping out to sort out failed print attempts and the changing of toner cartridges. Lexmark is big in to the concept of printer management, and De La Salle argues that if staff using printers were given a basic training course in their operation, costs would be much lower. The 6,500-person operation has developed a system it hopes will help cut these costs. Lexmark customers can go to the company’s web site and subscribe, free of charge to receive notification of upgrades to printer software and firmware automatically. De La Salle argues this is a step in the direction of reducing printer-associated costs. The company is also working on the development of a forms product which should help organizations cut the cost of pre-printed stationary. De La Salle said at the NetEvents conference in Interlaken, Switzerland last week that around a third of all pre-printed stationary is thrown away at the moment. Final specifications of the product have not yet been decided upon, but Lexmark is aiming to produce a simple to use, printer-based offering. It is not quite brave enough to do it on its own yet and will look to partners to help it out.
