Least Cost Printing – A Strategy

My posting about Least Cost Printing several weeks ago created some interesting comments here and on other forums. After reading some of them it seemed to me that there may be some value in providing greater definition to the topic.

The Strategy

Least Cost Printing is a simple strategy that is designed to minimize document output costs within the mixed technology environments that most of you have in your organizations: it defines the least expensive method of output for specific job types. It is the antithesis of a program to take advantage of clients but rather allows clients to leverage their technology investments at the lowest expense.

Hard Costs & Soft Costs

When designing a least cost printing strategy you need to decide what hard costs and whether or not you wish to include soft costs such as user convenience, impact on productivity and environmental issues. The most simple example is the value of the time it takes for one of your employees to walk across a room or department to retrieve a printed job.

An Example

A simple scenario based on three assumptions about your environment follows:

• Average loaded cost of a classification of employee is $40,000/yr or $0.3205 per minute


• Average monochrome cost per page of your desktop inkjet printers is $0.0830 per page


• Average monochrome cost per page of your network laser printer is $0.0180 per page

In this scenario the cost differential is $ 0.0650 per page so what is the justification for printing to the desktop inkjet versus the network laser printer? If you estimated that an employee takes a minute (on average) to pick up a print job from the network printer your strategy would be that only jobs of five (5) monochrome pages or less can be output on a desktop inkjet printer ($0.3205 /$0.065 =4.93 pages).

Building Your Strategy

You can build your own strategy with as much complexity (or simplicity) as you like. Current expenses based on technology or model specific, employees by classification, department or individual, amortization of hardware or operating costs alone and any soft cost you feel are significant. The more granular you get the higher the savings but they will be offset by higher development and management costs. My recommendation is to start simple and refine as you go!

Expense Reduction

When working with my clients on document output environment assessments and strategy development I always include this component in my recommendations. Following the simple example above if I take all inkjet monochrome pages resulting from jobs of six (6) or more pages and assume their migration to a less cost device I can project savings based on the client’s actual environment. This is a cascading calculation, inkjet to cartridge-based laser, both of them to component-based multifunction devices and finally consideration for electronic document distribution. The same is done for color and duplex printing with a typical end result of about 35% expense reduction.

If the client is considering fleet management for their printer fleet then the calculations would obviously be made on the new contracted cost per page. The point here is that a least cost printing strategy and a fleet management program are not mutually exclusive but complementary components of managed print services.

Implementation

Historically, this type of strategy has been very difficult to implement successfully: how could you get users to conform and how did you know if they did or not. As mentioned in my first post on the topic there are software tools today that are very good at implementation of a least cost printing strategy and they can deliver a return on investment of six months or less.

For purposes of this posting I have tried to keep this discussion simple; least cost printing is a simple concept but it does take a bit of work to get there. If you would like to explore a least cost printing strategy for your organization or if you just have questions please feel free to contact me.

It is my intent to discuss this in future postings if there is interest from the readers.