That gentle hum of your printer is the sound of money burning
Posted by Mark Lennon on Mon, Nov 22, 2010 @ 11:32 AM
That gentle hum of your printer is the sound of money as it slowly burns away. That rustle of paper represents wasted time and resources. The print key you hit initiates a sequence of events that is inefficient, costly and may even leave a poor impression with your valued clients!
It’s an unnoticed miscreant, one that steals, saps and seizes while backs are turned. Often overlooked in the drive to cut expenses, printers constantly snip and bite into corporate profits, deplete worker productivity, and devour valuable resources. Is this a picture of your output management system?
How did the printer become the villain when its only fault was to periodically jam and demand yet another ink cartridge?
Printers and the print systems have spread and proliferated over time—working alone, in pairs and in clusters they’ve colonized offices, desktops, and homes. Businesses have owned and operated printers for many years. Most use several—and several different kinds, brands and models—for different tasks. They get used for just about anything and everything. It’s a sleeping giant with tentacles in every part of your organization.
Opportunities to tame output management are rarely pursued. As one IT Director recently said, “When I think about our printers, it’s almost as if large areas of expenditure are hidden from us. I just cannot get a handle on it. And what’s more, they take a lot of my department’s time to support them and keep them running.”
While companies know the costs of printers, the expense of maintenance, and the price of replacing existing machines, few know the full extent of wasted paper, the amount of petty cash spent on replacing ink pens and cassettes, or the time it takes your staff to gather reports from multiple locations.
And what about the costs of supporting and maintaining all these different print streams?
For many organizations each corporate system has its own set of printers, in many cases duplicating output and adding to complexity. The Enterprise Resource Management system might require print output to be coded in ABAP for invoices and paychecks. Print for the Customer Requirements Management system might be coded in Java. Corporations have dozens of applications written in many programming languages.
Then there are the demands of special purpose printers—one for labels, one for barcodes, and another for packing slips. That’s just the traditional paper printing outlets. Increasingly, print has taken on electronic form with more and more PDFs, email attachments and faxes being sent each day. It’s a support nightmare!
Tackling these issues on a printer-by-printer basis or at the department level is unlikely to produce results.
To improve efficiencies and reduce cost you need to treat print output as a coordinated whole. Viewing print systems as a completely integrated process enables you to better track costs, discover areas of duplication and waste, and seek process improvement and efficiencies.
As one of our clients recently said, “Simply changing the way we look at printers to see them as a single corporate system has opened the door to eliminating a lot of waste, reducing unnecessary expense and start implementing output management improvements.”
There are many point-solution print management tools on the market. Tools that help you design print forms, or manage output flows, or even track maintenance and support contracts. Resist the temptation to solve your output problem piecemeal. Experience shows that you really need to grasp the bull by the horns. The greatest impact in improvements in output management results from the deployment of a single central tool that can manage the whole process from form design, to print management and delivery.
Imagine a scenario where a single system connects the print needs of your entire company, so that the output from various departments and remote locations are linked and coordinated.
The output of all your business systems now flow through the enterprise to be delivered at the location it’s needed, when it’s needed. Imagine a system that ensures all printers, no matter where they are located, work together supporting organizational efficiency, rather than chugging away in wasteful isolation. Now, imagine this happening seamlessly without the need to configure or program each printer.
That gentle hum of your printer is the sound of money as it slowly burns away. Isn’t it time you started to do something about it?