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How to Reduce Printing Costs: Assess and Manage Your Environment

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If you are in need of a solution that will help your organization save money, look no further than an opportunity to reduce the cost of creating documents. When it comes to IT projects, updating your printing practices offers one of the easiest ways for you to reduce cost and look good to your boss at the same time. Why? Because printing isn’t very "cool," so it’s typical that no one pays much attention to it. Meaning it’s not in control.

To help get your arms around your imaging and printing costs, and get the data that you need to make recommendations and changes, you may consider starting with an assessment of your imaging and printing environment.   

The Case for Imaging & Printing Assessments

Most organizations do not regularly spend the time to audit their imaging and printing costs. Printers tend to “just work,” copiers are serviced on a regular basis, fax machines last forever and no single department within the organizations is responsible for all of these. 

Does your organization have the appropriate controls in place to accurately account for and reduce hard-copy spend? If not, consider an imaging and printing assessment, which can help your organization identify all of the costs to produce printed, copied and faxed pages. The assessment results, once validated, become your baseline, or current-state, costs. 

Imaging and printing assessments are time-intensive projects and require input from multiple departments within your organization. Therefore, it is important to identify critical success factors, get stakeholder buy-in, and be clear about the purpose and payoff before launching an assessment. If you are the decision maker, prioritize the assessment and make sure that everyone on your team understands its importance. 

I know, it sounds like a lot of work, but trust me — the payoff is significant. It's been estimated that organizations can save 10% -30% of their current state spend by understanding and actively managing their print environment.  

Identify Critical Success Factors

It is important to align your imaging and printing assessment with your overall business objectives. For example, if your organization is adding a second shift, it’s probably a bad idea to downsize the printers in the production departments. Or, if your organization is going through a reorganization you can align the reduction of your imaging and printing costs with your new business structure. Without performing an assessment, you may end up with excess printing and copying capacity.

Every organization has unique critical success factors, however they all tend to center around reducing costs. Below are examples of critical success factors that I have worked with clients to achieve over the years:

• Balance the number of hardcopy devices based on departmental requirements.
• Reduce overall hardcopy cost X% by Y data.
• Reduce the physical footprint of hardcopy devices by X%.
• Increase the efficiency of the hardcopy devices in X departments.
• Reduce color printing costs while providing color access to more people.
• Restrict access to color and reduce the number of color capable devices.
• Identify workflow software, such as network faxing, that reduces cost and improves efficiency.
• Make sure there is zero downtime in critical areas.
• Reduce energy costs and create a greener workplace.

Get Stakeholder Buy-in

In order to keep your organization focused on completing the assessment, you need stakeholder buy-in. Therefore, you should identify some surface-level facts about your environment to help tell a story and make the case for an assessment. For example:  

• There’s no easy way to calculate current state costs.
• You’re procuring from too many vendors, which complicates the management of your printer environment.
• You’re not leveraging overall spending power.
• There is too much toner sitting under desks, which is money wasted, particularly if the toner expires and is no longer useful.
• There are too many full paper-recycling bins.
• There is no central ownership of the supply chain activities.

By understanding how printing and imaging fits into the big picture, your organization will be able to streamline all of the supply chain and support activities required to maintain your devices. Often, this results in further cost savings.

Be Clear About the Purpose and Payoff

Make sure that you and your superiors clearly understand the purpose of your imaging and printing assessment. For example: “We need to perform the assessment to better understand our hardcopy costs. Then we can put a plan in place to rationalize and reduce these costs.” 

Calculate the potential payoff, erring on the conservative side. Feel free to reach out for assistance with the purpose and payoff. Organizations that specialize in imaging and printing assessments can help you clarify this process, and may even offer additional suggestions that will make your assessment more successful. 

Your Thoughts

Has your business ever performed an imaging and printing assessment? Was it what you expected? What were the results?

Jeffrey Goldstein is Senior Consultant at MCPc and is responsible for the delivery of hardcopy and value-added services within the Lifecycle Management Group. Connect with Jeff on LinkedIn.

Image Credits: http://www.flickr.com/photos/yospiff/2126043460/