As the end of the fiscal year rapidly approaches for many businesses, everyone is looking for ways to reduce costs and save money. But before you rush to banish free coffee for employees to save a buck, take a look at your printers. You'll be amazed at the ways that printers are costing you money. After you learn about that, stay tuned, as Fraser has a solution that can save you up to 30% of your printing. But first, those dastardly printers...
Eight Ways Your Printers Are Costing You Money
- When your printer goes down, so does your productivity. Nobody realizes how much we rely on our printers until they aren't working. You can't print out the next day's new business proposal, and since you don't know when the printer will be back online, you may have to shell out money to have it printed offsite. That means you have to make a trip to your local office print shop to get the job printed which means ineffective use of your time as well as the monetary expenditure.
- You are leaving yourself open to a security issue. When you keep those older, no-longer-supported printers because they still "work", you're setting yourself up for a security nightmare. Without security patch updates and support from the manufacturer, that printer that is hooked up to your network is a sitting duck waiting for a cybercriminal to find his/her way into your business. And if your hard drive isn't secured and you decide to get a new printer, throwing your old one in the dumpster out back may not end well either. That's because your printer's hard drive keeps a copy of all of the documents you copied, printed, scanned or faxed on it during its lifetime. If you can remember what all of those are, then you will understand there's plenty of juicy information that a hacker can use to make your business's life hell.
- Your mobile workforce can't figure out how to print documents from their phone. The mobile workforce is real, and as many businesses have multiple locations, being able to support employees who are constantly on the go is critical to your bottom line. If you're going to have mobile employees, you have to be able to set them up for success, and that includes a mobile print solution. Without it, they're held back from being productive, and that costs you money!
- Buying one-off printers or allowing departments to purchase their own devices can be a costly endeavor. There are lots of ways in which departments make their own choices when purchasing items for productivity. On the surface, it would seem a no-brainer that each department knows what they need in terms of technology, so why not allow them to buy their own items? Now imagine that each department buys their own brand of printer that they like best, and all of them are different, requiring different parts and different toners to run. Imagine the cost of filling your supply closet with that bundle!
- The effectiveness of your print policies can't be measured. Your IT and administration come up with an acceptable use policy for all of your printers and copiers. If you don't have a way to monitor printing, those policies aren't really enforceable, and you can't tell if the policy is having the desired effects you intended.
- You can't monitor print usage, therefore you don't know how much of your precious supply dollars you're wasting. We've all seen it. Bob (or John, Joe, Billy or Mike!) are printing out spreadsheet after spreadsheet for financial reporting. These documents aren't formatted to print double-sided or on ledger paper, so what was a 20-page ledger document prints out at 123 regular size paper prints. Better yet, maybe Michelle (or Marcy, Ann, Betty) in HR decided it would be easier for her to print 50 full-color invitations for her daughter's Pretty Princess 6th birthday party in the office rather than going to her local print shop, because she's so busy, and it's really not that much printing compared to the whole HR department (insert sarcasm here). We all know there are dozens of wasteful print habits all over our offices, and if we don't track the usage, we'll never find where we can improve to save money.
- The closet full of 75 different types of toner for each device in your office is ridiculous. It was decided that to reduce downtime for employees, our business is going to have one spare toner on hand for every printer and copier in the office. After doing a walk of our office, we know we need 38 different types of toner, some with four toners because of color printing. Let's for guessing sake say each toner runs about $100. That's nearly $4,000 in toner, just for the black and white, sitting in a closet, waiting to be used. I'm sure your business can find better uses for $4,000.
- You pay your internal IT staff way too much money to have them managing individual printers. It's great to have smart and capable IT people in your business, and you're paying them well so that they generate new and innovative ways to do the things for your business that drives growth and profit. If you're not a professional print shop, those IT people are wasting valuable time changing toner, clearing paper jams or other fixes to get printers back up and running.
OK, so now you're either scared to death that someone is going to think you haven't done your homework when to comes to print costs OR you're completely overwhelmed with how on earth you're going to fix this open window with dollar bills flying out of it. There is a solution, and it's not as difficult as you might think. With Managed Print Services, you can tackle all of these issues.
Managed Print Services is exactly what it sounds like. An outside person is paid a monthly fee to monitor, repair and deal with all of your printing issues. With Fraser's Managed Print Services, our Managed Print experts come out to your company and conduct an evaluation on the print fleet you currently have in place and find ways to improve your environment. That means implementing print policies that are enforced, monitoring print usage and knowing where waste is coming from and making sure all of your print devices have all of the latest security patches and are still supported by their manufacturer. It also means automatic toner replenishment, so your closet full of toner can retire and be used for all that extra free coffee!