How Do You Rationalize Your Desktop Printers?

Do you, or does your organization have a strategy for desktop printers? If you are like most of the managers I speak to the answer is no. When they do it is typically that desktop printers are not allowed at all or the exact opposite; anything goes! I am not sure either of these are real strategies.

My experiences have revealed very few fleet management providers address the entire desktop fleet and usually ignore the impact of their expense in assessments. If you notice I specifically said fleet management because I believe a broader managed print services engagement includes all of the devices by default.

I think desktop printers are often ignored for the following reasons:

• Their impact on costs is underestimated
  
• They add to the complexity of the project
  
• No one wants to address the associated political issues
  

Impact on Your Document Output Environment

If you believe your desktop printers will not have a significant impact on your expenses you may want to think again. If I look back over some recent clients' environments it is not at all unusual for the inkjet devices alone to look something like this:

• Inkjet devices ranged from 3 to 33% of the overall device population
  
• Inkjet produced pages ranged from 2 to 11% of the total pages
  
• Inkjet driven expenses ranged from 6 to 43% of the total expense
  
• Savings from an effective inkjet strategy ranged from 8 to 65% of the total savings
  

The actual averages would be in the upper half of these ranges, there were a couple of environments included where a first pass at removing desktop printers had already been completed. The message within the data is that most clients are quite surprised by the actual impact of their desktop, and specifically inkjet devices.

Complexity

Adding locally connected desktop printers to a well designed MPS project does not increase the work and complexity beyond the potential benefits. It is understandable why a fleet management provider who is not likely to increase their revenues as a result of this effort would not want to include them. However, you as the client or end-user should be concerned with a component of your document output environment with as much potential impact as the desktop devices may actually have. The actual savings from a good desktop strategy for some of the clients included in the numbers above ran into thousands of dollars per month.

Political Issues

When you conduct a physical survey inside an enterprise you hear every reason why someone needs (deserves) a personal desktop printer. I have had the pleasure of $450 per hour professionals sit me down and present their 30 minute justification.

Security is an issue that no one believes can, or will be challenged but it can be:

• Network printers and multifunction devices have very good secure print functions
  
• How secure is printing a document on a slow desktop printer to leave it sit in the output tray or on the desktop?
  
• Security is in the workflow and not the device
  

Having a personal printer saves time and therefore expense (soft costs):

• What was the cost difference between printing the job on the desktop versus the workgroup device?
  
• How much time was saved and what was the value of the time?
  
• Was printing the job on the desktop device a good investment?
  
• Are you really that busy 8 hours per day?
  

Printing to a workgroup device disrupts my workflow:

• An interesting statistic inside of my data is that a high percentage of users print less than one job per day to a local device?
  

Printing photographs requires a desktop color printer:

• If the photographic printing is that important you should be using color management and printing on a photo grade paper
  
• The above is rarely evidenced by the pages I see sitting on the printer and desktop
  

Let me make it clear that I am not one who believes that every desktop printer should be "yanked" out of an organization but am convinced that there should be a strategy for their deployment within a well managed document output environment. This discussion can provide an outline for such a strategy but obviously will need greater detail based on your unique environment, cost structure and corporate (institution) philosophy.

Print Assessment or Proposal?

If you are considering a study of your organization's printing environment are you looking for an assessment or a proposal?

The "print assessment" has become ubiquitous with dealers and fleet management providers employing them as a marketing strategy to develop hardware placement and printer aftermarket proposals. While there is no question these assessments provide value to the dealer, how well do you as the client benefit from them?

I suggest that a well designed and executed assessment should deliver something other than a selling proposal as its final outcome; rather providing detailed analysis and reports that enable you to bring your unmanaged print environment under control. Further, it is worth investing in a project that meets these criteria but not in a selling proposal; that is a marketing cost the dealer should bear!

The majority of the assessments that I see (and the tools used to perform them) focus on locating network print devices and their monthly page volumes (ideal for hardware replacement and laser cartridge sales). While vitally important data, it is not enough to develop an effective strategy for your document output environment.

• Many, if not most assessments ignore the local desktop printers which often represent from 40 to 50% of your office printing expense and the greatest potential to drive savings
  
• An assessment should provide you with a technology refreshment strategy that considers effective use of current assets and mid- to long-term technology refreshment; not just wholesale replacement of your asset base
  
• I question the value of identifying usage volumes and costs without understanding the detailed underlying user behaviors that drive them – the assessment should provide the data that allows you to develop print output strategies that maximize productivity at the minimum costs.
  
• Do you desire to conduct a device (fleet) assessment or an assessment of your document output environment? Would you like to understand the workflows associated with the document lifecycle and look for opportunities to improve productivity, quality and production cycles? Is your objective to reduce costs and resource utilization including network bandwidth and storage?
  
• What final deliverable do you expect; a selling proposal, software generated report or one developed from analysis of the data and environmental knowledge
  

Robust and quality data from a well-executed assessment of your document output environment enables you to architect and implement an effective solution that delivers the improvements you envisioned.

With in-depth knowledge of your environment justifiable hardware, software and aftermarket solutions that account for your current situation and address your vision of your future environment can be developed.

I recommend before entering into any assessment agreements you should see what the resulting deliverable will be; a proposal or objective report? Is this deliverable simply a data dump from the collection tools database: is it a canned proposal generated by proposal generation software that is based on hardware placement or device management engagement: or is it a detailed analysis of your unique document output environment with consideration for your personal objectives?

If you are a dealer or service provider reading this post now is where belief part must come in! By providing your clients with a solution developed independent of hardware and based on open standards, you still have the best opportunity for a long-term business relationship. What competitor has a better understanding of their environment and needs or has established and demonstrated a trusted partnership rather than a supplier/buyer relationship?

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.