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Executive Debrief
The Average
Office finds:
- 30% of the
workday spent searching for documents,
- 7.5% are lost
completely
-
$20 is spent on labor
filing these documents
-
15% of all documents
are misplaced
-
$250 is spent on labor to recreate a lost
document
-
19 copies are made of each document
-
$120 is spent on labor searching for misfiled documents
The True Cost of
Printing:
Over the life of a printer, the cost split is found to be:
- hardware cost 5%
- operating costs 45%
- support costs 50%
20% of all helpdesk calls are printer related!
Ref:
Quocirca, 2006
ROI calculator
for managing your printer fleet
PrinterRx training highlight
Customizing Service run Intervals
Learn how to set your set your polling and printer
discovery intervals.
Grant's Tech Tip
PrinterRx impact on Network
PrinterRx will have very little impact on network bandwidth. The SNMP probes and the returned data are a few packets at best, and the interval for polling devices, and ‘timeout’ settings can be customized.
PrinterRx is a monitoring application. The small packets of data being passed create no degradation on the network that would affect bandwidth. PrinterRx does not require software or drivers to manage print queues or interfere with queue or job management on existing print servers, thus as a monitoring application we will not degrade network performance. To date we have had no complaints about the amount of network traffic printerRx is using.
For very large sites, the network traffic used can be adjusted by setting how often the printer discovery and printer polling agents run. In addition, if necessary, printerRx agents can be deployed over multiple servers on different subnets to further disperse the network traffic.
For more information
refer to:
printerRx Support portal
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User Printing Behavior
Our last
newsletter
identified broad considerations when executing a printer fleet strategy.
After all, only 10% of the $1.8 billion in document management
services is billed by dealers, whereas 90% is provided by other
document service providers who have long history with the corporation .
This month we will delve into understanding printing behavior of the
employees in the corporations. This leads to establishing printer
density and optimizing device types. User printing behavior is
integral in developing a printer fleet strategy for a corporation.
A major influence for the quantity of printing is convenience. If
a printer is fast & near, it will be used more frequently. To
get control of user printing, a corporation should create a culture based on responsible document output.
Education is the best approach to creating that culture. Employees
should be giving the total printing costs (TCO) of the printers
available - including that expensive desktop inkjet. When the
employee understands the "real" cost of printing a document, he can then
make intelligent decisions if and where to print. A word of
warning - constant pop-up reminders on desktops are annoying, a
time-drain and may result ing negative behavior.
What's wrong with electronic documents? Primarily, digital
technology is not tangible nor persistent. Our users should be
educated on when to print. If you're searching, gathering, or
changing, use digital if at all possible. If you are
understanding, comparing, or completing, use paper.
When users know how much output costs, and are accountable for how much they copy and print, they are more careful about document output.
As user printing behavior changes for the better, so do the savings
Get
more information on a PrinterRx solution
Print Strategy
Targets
So often the first question is what should my printer density target be?
We fall into the same trap. Sure, we can suggest that
print assessment tools should be used to identify and get rid of under-used devices,
replace unreliable printers, and track printing, but the key is selling
corporations on the need to set governing or management principals and using the
printer fleet management tools to support it. For example in an
average office setting, an account should have
5-10 employees to every 1 device. Utilization of devices should be at about 10% percent of
capacity and be up, running 95% of the time, and
not be over 50ft from and any user. Of course special applications will dictate different management rules,
but many factors need to be balanced to get to the optimal fleet. Your
fleet management product
should help to get to the optimal
deployment size, as well as manage it on an on-going basis.
This provides starting targets for numbers of devices an organization should
deploy. But these targets are effected by specific corporate
characteristics such as industry, organizational layout, departmental
loads, and printing requirements.
What about printer device types? Once again this is greatly
influenced by department and job requirements. As a general rule,
the number of types of devices and manufacturers directly effects the
cost per page - the greater the number of different printers, the higher
the total cost per page. An optimal target of 2 manufacturers with
3 to 5 device types in an non-production environment, excluding
specialized devices, is suggested.
Is an MFP required? Before deploying MFP's throughout the organization, one should ask,
"How many departments truly have a high demand for fax and scan from the same device from which you print and photocopy?"
A high-end printer might be more economical in specific locations. Nowadays, most people don’t need to leave their PC to receive or send a fax.
A similar question should be asked about color.
Color is becoming a more affordable option as prices
of color lasers continue to tumble. Color laser is winning out over
inkjet because unit costs have fallen and the total cost of ownership is
cheaper over a two to three year period. But color is still
10X the operational cost of B/W! With page coverage increasing due
to web printing, the color vs B/W question is increasing in importance.
Certainly MFP's and color printers are required, but deployment should
be done strategically based on departmental needs..
Companies are bleeding money from their bottom line thanks to antiquated printers.
Total cost per page skyrockets from printers that are beyond their "best before" dates
and suffering from jam, break/fix, and downtime woes. Printers
should be retired according to a retirement strategy which recognized
out-of-date printers as cost drains. In general, printers should
be retired within 10 years.
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