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The evolving digital era office Today's technological revolution has triggered profound changes in many office processes, resulting in increased employee productivity. The age of laptop computers, email, cell phones and networks that link electronic mail and voicemail promise 20-30% productivity gains, because data sharing is immediate and high-quality decisions are made faster. These trends have prompted other changes in the way office employees work with documents.
Digital document creation
The sophistication of current word processing programs has completely changed the way the office functions. It is much more common today for executives to create their own communications, independent of administrative support. The ability to easily create and modify documents has radically increased the demand for printed drafts. It isn't unusual for a major business presentation to go through a dozen or more versions, with each one printed out for various stakeholders to review. Printing volumes, therefore, continue to grow.
Expanding the document distribution chain
In the past, documents were copied and distributed by hand, mail or messenger. The manual nature of duplication and distribution automatically afforded control over the number of copies produced. Today, electronic documents are distributed via email and are printed at their ultimate destinations. More people are copied on documents because it is much easier to add recipients, and the activity appears to be without cost.
Often recipients make multiple copies because reference copies become disposable. It's easier, for instance, to keep a copy on the computer hard drive and print it as often as needed, instead of filing it in a cabinet.
Growing print volumes
Technological advances have brought increases in printing volume. Consider the fact that print volume typically soars when email is introduced into an office, in fact half of all email— including attachments—is now copied or printed4. No wonder that today there are 232 billion more impressions printed annually than there were in 2000, representing a 15% increase.
Digital Printing Environment
Digital copier/printers are rapidly replacing analog machines. These new advanced, efficient machines print at very high speeds and offer multiple finishing options. Two decades ago, the typical office worker might have had the use of a single copier. At an average small business of fifty people, today's document center has four fax machines, four copiers, three monochrome printers, a scanner and two-color printers.
Losing control of printing operations
Most companies do not harness the full potential of their digital solutions. These missed opportunities are especially evident when businesses consider:
- 93.3% of all copiers sold today are digital, and yet today up to 30% of copier/multi-function devices are not connected to company networks8. Users therefore don't have access to the most cost-effective and efficient printers in their office.
- Most users on a network are unaware of what printers are available to them, or the specific functions that different printers have (e.g. color, duplex printing, stapling, high speed or high volume capabilities, etc.).
- The majority of users on a network do not have the appropriate drivers loaded on their PCs to access printers and may not be able to print to the most costeffective printers on their network.
- Most businesses have acquired at least one color printer, yet most employees do not have easy access to it from their desktops.
Desktop printers are relatively slow, expensive to maintain with ink or laser cartridges, and offer none of the finishing capabilities that network printers provide. If multiple copies of a document are needed, the user must physically take the printout to the copier. If the user had been educated on the use of the network printing system, he or she could have simply sent the job directly to the copier and picked up the finished sets, without standing at the copier waiting for the job to finish.
These are real day-to-day issues that don't always have clear, easy solutions. However, they are important factors to consider as companies better understand and begin to control rising costs.
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