Optimizing Your Copier/Printer Fleet

While there are many environments and technologies to consider when designing a document strategy, companies are discovering that their printer and copier fleet can serve as an effective and profitable place to start.  Once you decide to begin efforts to design a document strategy, it is easy to become overwhelmed by the decision.  Work-group printers and copiers are a natural and sensible environment for a document strategy because they directly support the day-to-day business of organizations of all sizes and types from every industry. Ultimately, business operations depend on the efficiency, effectiveness and cost control associated with work group printers and copiers. 

Where do you begin? What should the scope of your strategy cover? How will you justify your efforts and demonstrate a return on investment? Here are some answers by suggesting five steps you can take toward an effective and profitable document strategy that can benefit your company.

Step One – Pay Attention

This first step to designing an effective strategy is to simply pay attention to your printer/copier environment. Many companies struggle to understand just how many printers reside in their corporations, how many pages are printed each month, or the cost of each sheet of paper that passes through their printer fleet. As a result, there are tremendous opportunities to save money without investing in any new equipment.  Since this effort is often overlooked in the demands of day-to-day operations, it can be beneficial to engage an outside firm to conduct the assessment and make recommendations for improvement. The timing of your activities can be crucial as well. Don’t wait until your contracts are about to expire; a lack of time to respond often forces companies to simply re-up their contracts and hope for the best.

Step Two – Target your Scope

By focusing on work-group printers and copiers, you can develop a comprehensive, yet manageable scope for your document strategy.  Document strategy must be comprehensive enough to  make sure that nothing of  importance is not overlooked.  Yet it also must be manageable enough to avoid the risk that nothing ever gets done. Developing a strategic approach to your printer/copier environment

may require a change in the habitual “this is the way we've always done it” mindset. As a result, an outside consultant with an independent view may be useful to overcome this barrier and bring about meaningful savings and improvements. In any case, targeting your scope to improve printer/copier performance and increase the effectiveness of your contracts and suppliers will help you make better decisions and more profitable recommendations.

Step Three – Build Return on Investment

Once you have gone through the analysis, assessment and evaluation needed to map your plan, now you face perhaps the most difficult task of all: Building and demonstrating a realistic return on investment. What can you look for in order to build ROI and justify your strategy? A few examples would be to inventory your printers and copiers, assess hardware, maintenance and support costs.  This approach will help you justify the return on investment in your document strategy.  Your activities will bring to light the data and perspective needed to better manage expenses, reduce your total cost of ownership, and develop a clear and measurable enterprise-wide strategy.

Step Four – Implement your Strategy

Even the most thoughtful document strategy will not be successful if it is not executed effectively. All of your assessments and proposed actions now must come together in a project plan that maps the course of your strategy and directs your efforts successfully.  While there may be many areas of effort included in the implementation of your strategy, here are a few core activities to consider.  Balance device deployment  – Analysts calculate that balanced deployment of printers and copiers can reduce your operating costs drastically. A balanced deployment strategy can improve device performance and cost, optimize asset utilization, maximize return on investment, and reduce total cost of ownership.  Matching features to user needs – The requirements of your printing/copying environment will evolve as your business evolves, so it makes sense to periodically evaluate the needs of each work-group as well as key employees in key functions. Negotiating contracts for optimal benefit – The time to evaluate the performance of your contracts and lease agreements is well before they are about to come up for renewal. View this opportunity as a means of providing an incentive for your vendors and suppliers to not only give you their best pricing, but also provide you with a higher level of service and performance.

Step Five – Manage the Environment

Once you have completed your assessment, negotiated the best contracts and implemented your strategy, it is important to monitor all key cost and performance indicators of both your devices and your vendors over time. Without ongoing management of the environment you may not be assured that the ROI you assumed is actually being reached and maintained.  As a result, organizations that optimize their work-group printer/copier environment are more likely to have an advantage.  Firms can begin to gain this advantage by an independent and non-bias assessment of work-group devices and their associated costs – which is most cases has never been tracked.  Often, this approach can uncover hidden cost savings and overlooked inefficiencies without the commitment for additional capital expenditures. 

If you or a business partner are currently looking into saving money with optimizing your copier printer fleet and would like more information on our products and services, please contact James Thomas at The MPS Group:

TELEPHONE: 210-344-0332

EMAIL: info@fixmyprinter.com

We look forward to doing business with you.