|
printerRx Naming Contest
Name the new addition to the printerRx family and win an iPod.
Deadline: February 5th
Enter here
Executive Debrief
Your
TCO for printing
A recent survey commissioned by Lexmark showed that board-level managers are alarmingly ignorant about the cost of print. Overall, 61% of finance directors had no idea at all of the cost of document production in their business. As a result, many finance directors have no plans to cut print costs, nor do they see document production costs as critical to financial budgeting.
Typically, only 10% of the office document overhead costs relate to equipment, supplies, and service expenses. For every $1 spent on equipment, supplies, and service, another $9 is spent on other overhead costs. These overhead costs include IT support and infrastructure, procurement and facility costs, end-user interaction time, and document management expense. These costs are fragmented in budgets and processes across the organization. Only about 10% of the real document costs are typically exposed by an assessment, which means that 90% of the actual costs are being ignored. In many cases, Total Cost of Ownership is not even close to the real “Total” cost.
New Stuff
White Papers:
follow link
-Best Practices in Printer Fleet
Mgmt
-Dealer advantage: Printer Fleets
-Managing Desktop Printers
Flash presentations:
follow link
-Print Consulting Consortium
-Printer Lifecycle online
presentation
Grant's Tech Tip
Windows XP and printerRx Discovery
Bottom line: You may use XP, but with 8 threads the polling will take longer.
Windows XP has limitations in its networking abilities. Our experience has found that launching more than 8 polling worker threads, caused degradation in Windows XP. With Windows 2000 or 2003, we can easily go up to 20 worker threads with no degradation. It is recommended to utilize Windows 2000 or 2003 on the printerRx PC. However if Windows XP is required printerRx lowers the number of worker threads and the polling process takes a little longer.
For more information refer
to:
PrinterRx
Support portal
PrinterRx training highlight
Illegal device names
"Special" characters have special meaning in different applications. For example, web browsers (as per the HTML spec) interpret "#" in a particular way that prevents the characters after the "#" from even getting into PrinterRx. This situation will occur in any data field, but is most important in those used for unique identifiers (names) or sort fields.
It is recommended that special characters not be used for printer names. Do not use characters such as:
#,$,%,^,&,*,:,@
|
Top 10 Best Practices in Managed print
Our last
newsletter
discussed compliance issues and getting internal
auditors off your back. This month we will start
the countdown of Best Practice in managed print
services. Best practices follow the six sigma model of define – measure – analyze – improve – control.
1. Develop a Print Strategy: For any corporation who wishes to reduce costs by managing their printing, a document and print strategy is essential. Best practices conclude that fleet assessment and strategy development should be hardware vendor independent. A high degree of independence should deliver a high degree of objectivity. Without this independence, the assessment will likely be focused on hardware technology, not business needs.
A Print Strategy includes baseline print costs, recommendations, a solution extrapolated to corporate-wide, and method for measuring results of implementation. A proposal for more services and/or hardware does not constitute a strategy. Your strategy decision tool should be independent from the hardware vendor. Relying on the manufacturer to decide which device is most cost effective for the corporation is not in line with the hardware vendor – to sell more devices and associated consumables - ink & toner. The corporate print strategy should be revisited every 3 to 5 years.
2. Establish a Baseline:
The baseline assessment is used as the kick-off point for developing the corporate print strategy. During baseline assessment, best practices incorporate all costs into the picture, not just consumables - the largest cost being human resources. The baseline should consider device and printing behavior over a period of time, 30 to 60 days, and include how, what, where, how much, and what it costs.
If the Print Service Provider already has a printer fleet management tool which contains a database of device inventory, printing activity and printer events, his revenue can be increased by offering assessment services. In addition, the Service provider can prepare a competitive managed print services proposal based upon the inventory and understanding of his client’s printing history. A greater knowledge of the printer fleet than both his client and competitor is a significant strategic advantage.
3. Treat printers as an asset:
Best practices recognize that the Printer Fleet is a corporate asset, and thus, should be managed as any other IT asset. Printer asset management looks at a device through its lifecycle and the fleet from the enterprise perspective. A printer life encompasses purchase decisions, printer financials, maintenance, supplies management, and retirement. The enterprise perspective looks at the fleet inventory using corporate metrics, comparisons and trends, making decisions from a global, rather than, unit or commodity basis.
Most solutions look at a snapshot in time to track, optimize & identify cost savings. To do this, approximations for costs are used. Your print strategy tool should address inventory and its changes through time, maintenance, supplies and the associated vendors. The information should allow you to decide when to retire printers and which model/manufacturer is most cost effective as a replacement.
We will continue with the top 10
best practices in next month's issue.
Get more
information on a PrinterRx solution
Determining your Printer Life
What should you expect as the lifetime of your printer? Most printers come with a one-year warranty.
To determine how long that printer should last, Take that number of months and the maximum duty cycle of the printer (stated in pages per month) and multiply those two numbers together. The result will give you a pretty good idea how many pages that printer will print before you begin to see reliability problems.
Printer problems may arise when total page count > 12 (mth)
X duty cycle (pages/mth)
Some well-cared-for printers will print many more pages in their lifetime,
but past that volume, your printer is living on borrowed
time.
So how
can you increase printer life? With care and feeding,
of course. You should know how many pages can be printed between cleanings.
For example, HP says 300,000 pages but this may vary widely. Cleanings often include replacing rollers and doing routine maintenance. Maintenance kits
are critical for this purpose. If you want to maximize the life of your printers while saving a few bucks on service calls, learn how to do this, and clean the paper dust out of your printers regularly.
A word of warning though: Some devices provide a
"replace maintenance kit" warning alert based upon time,
not actual pages printed. If this is a low usage
printer, you may be replacing the maintenance kit too
frequently.
The lifespan of a printer depends on the sturdiness of the machine, how much
it is used & abused, and maintenance & care. Printers will eventually fail, but some will last nearly forever
(I still own a Lazerjet III).
As a
rule of thumb: The expected life of b&w printers is 5
years, and color printers is 3 years. Although it
is important to monitor the maintenance frequency,
downtime, alerts, and of course, page count.
Recommend This Newsletter To A Friend Do you have a friend or colleague who
might enjoy this newsletter? Please forward it to him or her and point out the
subscription page
|
