Improving Your Document Output Environment

Are you the one who has been tasked with improving your organizations document output environment – where will you begin?

Taking the common path will mean following the recommendations of most of the vendors you will encounter and focus on reducing the operating costs of your network printer fleet. You may even contract with one of them to "manage" it under an MPS or fleet management umbrella.

Obviously, the network printer fleet is a major component of your document output environment but only that, a component. If you do not consider other elements such as user behaviors and workflow, or try to address the network printer fleet in isolation from the rest of the environment you are missing the greatest opportunity to maximize your environment.

It is my belief that it is just as important to understand how and where the documents originate as it is to know where they are output. Analysis of the data I find in my document environment assessments invariably allows me to identify expense reductions as high as 35% without ever addressing operating costs. Without this knowledge how can one truly maximize both the fleet and user productivity?

Three simple examples to illustrate this point:

In a recent assessment I discovered that the client was printing approximately 36,000 color pages per month from e-mail. At a contracted cost of $0.075 per page they were wasting a minimum of $2,700 per month on this unnecessary activity.

In another project the client's equipment supplier recommended they upgrade a color-enabled MFD due to increased volume. Analysis of the data showed that just over 40% of the volume was coming from another workgroup who had an MFD that did not meet their needs. Replacing the device with too much volume would not have solved the core problem.

It is not unusual to discover that a percentage of users print 100% of their documents in color without any application-based requirements to do so. Additionally they often do this on desktop printers with a cost per page averaging 20 cents.

When performing assessments many vendors map the client's devices, some even map the volumes produced by those devices but mapping the volumes by user really provides a view of how the document output assets should be placed to best meet their needs.

More often than not I encounter prospects and RFPs that are only addressing the network printer fleet without consideration of the desktop printers, facsimile machines and MFDs. It is only with a balanced deployment of all these classes of devices that you can maximize your environment. Detailed data that shows job characteristics such as size by pages allows you to develop an effective least cost printing strategy.

The point of this post is if you are setting out to re-engineer your print output environment do not shortchange yourself by limiting the scope of the project. Assessing and analyzing all components will provide you with the knowledge of their interdependencies and ultimately allow you to maximize each one individually. Stay in touch for more detailed discussions of these topics.