With a Print Management Strategy: Cut Expenses Without Negatively Impacting Productivity

The CXO Series Practical Strategies for Financial Executives WHITE PAPER
The Importance of a Print
Management Strategy
Darrell Amy, MBA, CDIA | Convergence Consulting, Inc. Sponsored by DocuAudit International
Executive Summary Today's rising overhead expenses drive organizations to find practical Report Contents ways to reduce costs. Profit-conscious executives face the challenge of Executive Summary 1 either reducing headcount or reducing overhead expenses. Much of the time, either of these strategies can have a negative impact on productivity The Impact of Printing 2 and morale. Every so often a strategy appears that can provide significant Opportunities for Improvement 4 expense control and enhance productivity. One of these areas is office printing. A Managed Print Strategy 5 Documents drive business processes. That's why an average of 1-3% of a i company's annual revenues are consumed by document production . To make matters worse, this expense is growing in many organizations.
A Print Management Strategy allows you to control these expenses by outsourcing the management of your fleet of printers. In this type of usage-based model, you only pay for the prints you use. Best of all, no capital expenditures are required since the agreement is for the management of your existing fleet. This paper presents the importance of a Print Management Strategy. Current economic, environmental, productivity and IT department impacts are explored. Benefits of implementing a print management strategy are itemized. The CXO Series Practical Strategies for Financial Executives


The Importance of a Print
Management Strategy Many executives are looking for meaningful strategies to cut overhead Rising costs in virtually expenses in today's tough economy. At the same time, they need to find every area of business ways to boost productivity and return on assets. The challenge is that challenge executives to these two goals are usually at odds. Boosting productivity usually requires find ways to reduce capital expenditures, while cutting expenses means harming productivity. overhead without harming productivity. Every so often, a strategy appears that allows you to cut expenses without negatively impacting productivity. This may be possible by optimizing your office printing environment. The Growing Impact of Printing
Economic Impact According to the Gartner Group, office printing consumes 1-3% of a Office printing consumes 1 iiicompany's annual revenue . This means that a $10 million company will to 3% of annual revenues spend between 100 and 300 thousand dollars on document output this according to the Gartner year. Group.
Some statistics show that overall office printing volumes are declining at iv1-2% per year. However, much of this may be due to the overall contraction of the global economy. This statistic can be somewhat deceptive in that most companies continue to experience growth in printing inside their own organization. Other companies need to right-size their printing fleets to compensate for a smaller workforce.
Many companies are also doing more color printing in the office. This is The average office worker especially important since color prints cost 5 to 10 times more than black consumes 10,000 pages and white prints. per year, the equivalent of 60% of a tree. On top of the growing costs, most companies have multiple vendors for printer hardware, supplies and repairs. Managing these relationships and processing multiple invoices creates unnecessary costs.
Many companies have no idea what they are spending on office printing. Typically, this is because costs for supplies, service, hardware and support are buried across multiple budget lines.
The Importance of a Print Management Strategy Page 2 of 7 © 2008, Convergence Consulting, Inc. The CXO Series Practical Strategies for Financial Executives
Environmental Impact Printers are some of the Office printing also has a tremendous impact on the environment. The biggest consumers of vaverage office employee consumes 10,000 pages of paper per year . Since electricity in the off... [download for more]