It’s easy to forget about the office printer as it sits in the corner, only called into action when someone needs a hard copy of a document. But in these troubled financial times, an enterprise that turns its attention to its print infrastructure – from the hardware itself to print management software – may find that there are significant costs savings to be had.
Recent research from InfoTrends claims that for every £1 that is spent on printing a document in the office, another £9 is spent on other burdened costs that are not being exposed, such as departmental stationery budgets or budgets that are consolidated under the umbrella of invoices, meaning the source and nature of office print costs are often difficult to understand.
Analyst house IDC suggests that a balanced deployment of printers can produce savings of up to 23% in typical enterprise deployments, based on industry averages which suggest a poorly managed printing regime can cost around £400 a year a head in some organisations.
Keeping an eye on print costs
It is no surprise therefore to see vendors making waves in the Managed Print Services (MPS) sector. MPS offerings can help streamline an enterprise’s printing infrastructure – from diagnosis and remote management to ongoing tracking of the effectiveness of the printing environment and automatic consumables ordering.
French print management software company Doxense recently added to its international subsidiary companies by setting up for business in the UK, on the back of claims that its software can help cut printing costs by as much as 20%.
Its Watchdoc software sits on a print server to monitor, track and report on the usage of the enterprise print estate. It counts all printouts made from every printer on the network and can be set up to manage print workflows to traffic print queues to the printer best suited to the job.
UK Country Manager Lee Schofield suggested that an organisation with around 1,000 people on the printer network can expect to produce about 7.8 million pages over the course of a year. Of these up to 20% will never be read, and 20% will be printed in colour, resulting in a huge waste of time and resources.
In January 2009, Konica Minolta and Canon both released new versions of their MPS platforms. Canon’s UniFLOW Output Manager 4.0 features a pop up that appears when a document is sent to the print queue that calculates the cost of each print job and identifies an alternative device which will process the job at a lower cost.
Samsung joined the MPS party in March 2009, offering its channel partners the, “necessary management information and billing software tools to create unique MPS offerings for their customers.”
Its offering features an Assessment Consulting Tool (ACT), a USB device that can be plugged into any networked PC and automatically assess a company’s current printing environment. It scans status information and IP addresses and reports on how many prints each printer and MFP has produced. Significantly, the ACT has full multi-vendor capability, so is ideal for use in mixed fleet environments.
A Cost Simulation Tool (CST) can then run a cost simulation to demonstrate to customers how much money they could be saving. The platform also offers monitoring and remote management capabilities.
“Samsung has designed this MPS platform to enable its channel partners to create customised hardware and software solutions to meet each customer’s individual business needs,” says Graham Long, vice president of Samsung’s European printing operation. “This will enable our channel partners to develop more strategic relationships with their customers through ongoing service and consultancy.”
Samsung has recently been pushing into the B2B printing sector, with a marketing campaign called ‘Ctrl+P’. It is aiming to demonstrate how Samsung printing services can help companies to simplify their printing environment, enabling complete control over cost, compliance and complexity.
Geoff Slaughter, director of the print division, Samsung Electronics UK, says: “With research showing that companies can save as much as 40% of their costs by getting their printing environment under control, organisations can now realise these savings with Samsung’s wide range of print solutions – allowing them to reduce costs through efficient processes and print solutions.”
Printing through the cloud
One way of increasing utilisation and efficiency of a company’s print infrastructure is to head down the wireless route – if a printer is not constrained by network wires then more people can have access to it.
Samsung has released the SCX-5635FN monochrome laser multifunction printer (MFP), which features optional wireless connectivity. The device delivers fast print and copy speeds of up to 33 pages per minute (ppm) and a first print out time of less than 8.5 seconds from standby, reducing the time office workers spend waiting for documents and increasing productivity.
The device’s wireless connectivity means that the workplace location of the SCX-5635FN does not need to be restricted by hard wiring capability. Its USB port enables users to print and scan directly with a USB device without having to log on to a PC, saving time and effort, the company says.
BlackBerry maker Research in Motion (RIM) recently announced that it had signed a deal with HP to provide various business applications for the smartphone. One of the new applications is HP CloudPrint for BlackBerry smartphones, which enables people to print emails, documents, photos and web pages from a BlackBerry to the nearest printer via an Internet connection.
The service should not be limited to HP printers, as the companies claim HP CloudPrint is printer-agnostic and driverless. This means that mobile workers will not have to be attached to a desktop to print their vital documents – which the companies claim will be valuable for mobile workers.
MFP or not to MFP?
In these times when consolidation is seen as a genuine way of saving money – using one machine to print, fax, scan and photocopy seems to make sense. But are they less than the sum of their parts or a good way to cut costs?
Samsung’s SCX-5635FN is designed for small-to-medium sized businesses and workgroups within larger organisations, where budgets may be tighter.
“Businesses are increasingly looking to boost productivity and this new MFP is the ideal solution to allow workgroups and small-to-medium businesses to get the most out of their printing environment,” says Long. “As well as offering high-performance printing, its new features are designed to meet the top priorities for this user group including speed, ease of use, convenience and low maintenance needs.”
It is the low maintenance needs that can often be forgotten with printers. The SCX-5635FN can hold up to 550 sheets of paper at a time, reducing the frequency that users need to restock the printer.
It also has a four-line LCD control panel, which enables easier navigation of the printing options. Samsung says this can reduce the amount of training required as well as the trouble-shooting time.
CBR opinion
It does seem clear that many organisations do not really know just how much they are spending on their print infrastructure. If the analysts are to be believed, then there are significant savings on offer by approaching print infrastructure in a smarter way.
As well as a common-sense approach – for example, do you need to print every page of a document? – companies should look to MPS as a way of getting on top of print cost, leading to an increase in productivity and financial savings.
