|
PrinterRx Naming Contest
Congratulations to the winner of
the iPod for the name rXpress
-
the cost effective solution for small sites, quick audits, meter collection, and quotes.
For a demo of
rXpress, Visit us at :
ITEX 2007 in Las Vegas March 21-22
Executive Debrief
Old printers eating company cash
Companies are bleeding money from their bottom line thanks to antiquated computer systems and inadequate management of their information technology assets, according to a study released by Softchoice Corp.
Productivity is being stalled by IT
assets that are beyond their "best before" dates, which
causes more money to be poured into help desk budgets to
keep old computers limping along than it would cost to
replace them.
In trying to avoid up front costs for updating their equipment and software, the report suggests companies are spending more money than they save.
Grant's Tech Tip
How
fast is auto-discovery?
We had to do a large network search for printers at a corporation using rXpress. We used 256 threads to search multiple blocks of 65,536 addresses. Time to search each block was about 25 minutes or about 45 addresses/second.
Very fast!
For more
answers to your questions refer
to:
PrinterRx
Support portal
More 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
PrinterRx training highlight
Removing a device for
repair
PrinterRx tracks printers by IP address, MAC address, Serial number (when available) and Printer Manufacturer and Model. If PrinterRx detects a change of IP address with all other factors remaining the same, it assumes the printer has not changed, and continues monitoring with the updated IP address. If any of the other parameters change (for a given IP address), PrinterRx assumes that a new (or different) printer has been installed. This causes the previously defined printer at that IP address to be
automatically retired with all its historical data. PrinterRx now monitors the printer at that IP address as if it were a new entity.
From this, the best strategy for temporarily replacing printers is to keep the existing network interface with the printer to be repaired. Use a replacement printer with its own NIC and change the IP address to match that of the existing printer. That way, when the existing printer is repaired and returned to service, the historical data is preserved, as well as page counts on the replacement printer.
An undesirable method would be to remove the NIC from the existing printer and place it in the replacement with the same IP address. The software may or may not detect the replacement as a new printer (particularly if of the same make and model), and the page counts are almost guaranteed to be incorrect. If the replacement printer has a higher page count than the existing one it will be added as if the difference in the counts were actually pages printed. Similarly, for a lower page count the software will not reduce a page count, and will not report any pages as being printed until the internal printer page count reaches what was the previously stored page count for the existing printer.
|
Top 10 Best Practices in Printer
Fleet Management
Our last
newsletter
discussed the first 3 best practices in managed print
services. This month we will continue with
the countdown. Best practices follow the six sigma model of define – measure – analyze – improve – control.
4. Reduce: Best practices focuses on optimizing(!) the number of hardware manufacturers, the number of models, the number of suppliers & service providers, and the number of devices. The objective is to increase device throughput and yields and to reduce inventory costs due to assets and toner supplies.
The direction of managed print services is to reduce – to reduce total costs, to reduce the amount of printing, to reduce the number of devices, to reduce the number of manufacturers and models, and to reduce the number of vendors. Any vendor providing a regular report card on the client’s printing may have an inside advantage to increase the number of devices managed and to offer additional services in other areas of managed print services.
5. Automate:
Managing print services in a cost effective manner requires automation of many of the processes involved. Automatic device discovery and meter reads are only the beginning. The printer fleet management tool should also automate - service requests in the event of a device alert or toner request, maintenance reminders, device retirement and replacement, scheduled reports, printer yield comparisons, and so forth. The managed services should not add to the human resource burden.
6. Manage Desktop Printers:
Desktop printers are often the most expensive component of the printer fleet on a per page basis. Not only do they tend to be underutilized, but supplies are expensive and the printers are complex to track and manage.
Best practices do not recommend printing using direct-attached printers. Without going into detail, the logic for not using direct-attached printers includes: (1) the highest per page printing cost (TCO), (2) complex supplies management, (3) greater supplies inventory costs, (4) increased software management complexity, (5) added complexity for asset management, and (6) regulatory and compliance issues. Unfortunately, there is a proliferation of direct-attached printers, resulting in a challenge to organizations to wean employees off their desktop printers.
If the print strategy permits desktop printers, best practices recommend that the printers be restricted to a limited number of hardware model choices and should be network-attached, not USB-attached, to make them visible to the network and to the management tools.
7. Govern vendors:
Best practices require that vendors be actively managed. That includes all vendors: hardware, software, service, supplies, and consulting. Your vendor’s objectives are not necessarily compatible with your corporate objectives. Some corporations hire independent consultants during the assessment and strategy phase, but the deployment and ongoing operational phase also requires vendor governance.
Service Level Agreements (SLA) specify contractual activities that ensure your printers are available for use. The only way to ensure that the service vendor adheres to the SLA is to monitor over time the critical items. These metrics include % uptimes, average time it takes to resolve any printer problems, and frequency of breakdown.
Other areas of vendor governance include billing accuracy and corporate resources expended for the vendor.
8. Sustain savings through Continuous Improvement:
Once the fleet strategy is deployed, the corporation optimizes enterprise printing through pro-active monitoring of printer assets, contracts, supplies management, and service level agreements. As with every aspect of managed print services, a tool which collects and stores this device and printing data is necessary to support the intelligent recommendations the Managed Service Provider offers to his customers.
Continuous improvement requires active and continuous attention to print assets. Human behavior can easily slip back into old printing habits. Active monitoring can alleviate increases in costs rising from such fallbacks. This means continuous monitoring and ongoing measuring of the relative costs of printing on each device. It is a fallacy to rely upon the manufacturers’ benchmarks for each model. Each organization has different printing behaviors.
9. Monitor, Measure, Manage: The key to sustaining the savings reaped from managing printing is to measure, adjust, measure, adjust on a continuous and ongoing basis. This is where Managed Print Service Providers can retain and increase business by pro-actively demonstrating their value with regular report cards on their customer’s printing which include trend graphs showing pages, costs, and problems. This report card should provide areas where improvements can be made such as moving, swapping, or replacing – always with an eye to reduce total printing costs and increasing availability. Of course, a tool, such as
printerRx, is required to continuously monitor the corporate print environment and generate the data for such a report card.
10. Schedule Report Cards: Inherent in managed print services is a regular re-assessment of the corporate print environment. As with any business best practice, scheduled comparative assessment are necessary to stay on track competitively and strategically. The primary objective is to ensure that the savings realized by managed print services is being maintained. For instance, your strategy may have a target of 7 employees per device. Without due diligence and constant attention, this target can and will likely decline. A comparative report card would highlight any slide from target.
Reporting according to a schedule is critical. A best practices recommendation is to obtain a report of the corporate printing environment every 6 months. When and if corporate printing behavior aligns with the corporate print strategy, the report card may become annual. As a cost-effective approach, this report card can be performed by any print management tool that continuously monitors printer and printing activities.
The more you know about your corporate printer fleet, the greater potential in cost savings. Continuous attention to the printer fleet by managing print service on an ongoing basis will pay off on the bottom line.
Get more
information on a printerRx solution
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
|
