Common design leads to lower TCO

Apart from acquisition costs, many savvy businessmen have begun calculating the long-term costs of their print fleets and have in many cases discovered that they`re overpaying, most notably on consumables and maintenance.

"What most of these decision-makers are not seeing, however, is the cost attributed to lost time, when employees are required to replace consumables and perform even the most basic maintenance tasks on their desktop and workgroup printers, besides the costs associated with calling out a technician to perform these tasks for them," says Neil Rom, managing director of Printacom.

"These hidden costs are something that OKI has addressed as part of its campaign towards lowering TCO," he says, "and the results of this campaign speak for themselves. OKI today is a world leader when it comes to lowest TCO."

Rom says that across its entire product portfolio, OKI`s printers are designed firstly to make maintenance tasks easier, and secondly to feature a common design and mechanical layout internally.

"In a nutshell, should a user have changed the consumables on one model of OKI printer, they would easily be capable of doing so on another OKI model," Rom explains.

"Two OKI design differences enable this," Rom continues. "The first is the use of LED technology as opposed to conventional laser printer technology. LED technology requires less moving parts, inadvertently ensuring that most spares are user interchangeable. This immediately benefits a customer`s bottom line, since there are less technical bills and downtime to contend with.

"The second major difference is OKI`s single pass technology," he says. "Essentially, this means that in a colour printer, the four different coloured toner cartridges that blend to create the user`s desired colour, are installed in-line and in a horizontal configuration.

"Changing consumables is thus as simple as opening the printer`s top cover, unclipping the empty cartridge, sliding the fresh cartridge into its slot and closing the top cover again. It`s truly child`s play," he enthuses.

"My description of the process doesn`t truly do it justice, however," Rom explains. "Only once you have opened the machine up, would you realise how simple it is to clear a paper jam, replace a toner cartridge, fuser unit or belt-kit," he says.

"Even though fusers and belt-kits are classified as spare parts by many vendors, OKI has made these as simple to replace as a set of consumables."

Rom says as a tuning fork for TCO, OKI has strived to ensure that a normal, rather unskilled user does not take longer than two minutes to replace a belt-kit, a fuser unit or other consumables on any OKI colour printer.

"Provided users follow the directions (which are clearly and concisely detailed on the packaging of all OKI parts and consumables), they should be done in no time at all. And should take even less time if they have done this before, since the physical layout is nearly identical on every unit" Rom says.

"While it`s not often considered in the TCO debate, ease of maintenance is an important contributor to the long-term costs of printing. By allowing these parts and consumables to be easily swapped by a user, OKI has successfully made a substantial dent in the prospective TCO of printing for businesses of all sizes," he concludes.