Printing and copying costs are spiralling out of control in most organisations, with no sign that the paper deluge will slow down any time soon. According to one estimate from the Photizo Group, today printing accounts for around 6% to 10% of the average enterprise's annual IT spending each year.
Local companies will need to embrace MPS to bring runaway print costs back under control.
Kevin Johnstone is business development officer at Itec.
The truly alarming part of this statistic is that it might be conservative. The vast majority of the average organisation's total printing costs are invisible or uncontrolled, because organisations don't have the tools to track and manage them. In other words, this neglected and expensive component of the IT infrastructure is ripe for optimisation in a market where many companies are looking for ways to slash costs.
This is the primary reason that the global managed print services (MPS) market is enjoying such strong growth. In an MPS model, a service provider takes full responsibility for a company's entire print infrastructure, including all services, support, and supplies. The MPS provider should be able to guarantee cost-savings, backed by a predictable per-page cost.
There are a number of ways that MPS help companies achieve direct and indirect cost-savings of 20% to 30% in their document management environments. Here are few of them:
1. Improved visibility and predictability of costs
An MPS project should always start out with an in-depth audit of all the direct and hidden costs in an organisation's print environment - among them support, consumables, and hardware rental or amortisation costs. Once costs can be measured, they can be controlled and reduced.
2. Reduced support costs
Printer downtime accounts for an estimated 30% to 40% of all help-desk calls in the average organisation - and that's without considering what it costs in lost productivity. MPS can take this expensive headache off an organisation's hands and improve uptime through proactive maintenance and management of the infrastructure.
3. Device consolidation and optimisation
Managed service providers can help their clients reduce printing costs by looking at their existing print fleets and replacing ageing equipment that has become expensive to support and maintain. They can identify opportunities to save money by consolidating and centralising printers, scanners, fax machines and other output devices.
4. Simplified vendor management
Companies receive a single bill for better forecasting and expense allocation. That simplifies vendor management and provides a transparent view of just how much money is being spent on printing and copying every month.
5. Transition from capex to opex
True printing as a service shifts print assets from capex to opex, eliminating the risks of asset redundancy and of under- or over-utilisation of devices.
6. Freeing up human resources
Managing printing and copying is a drain on the time of the operations, IT and finance departments. MPS makes a service provider responsible for the operational detail of keeping the document output infrastructure humming so that skilled IT, financial and procurement resources can rather focus on activities that add value to the business.
7. Control of abuse and wastage
When companies don't carefully track and monitor printer and copier usage, they usually lose a lot of money as a result of end-users abusing company resources for personal printing, or simply wasting paper and ink by running off prints they never collect from the printer. MPS can help companies put the tools and processes in place to control use of printing resources in line with company policy.
Most companies should be looking at MPS as a way to shave costs from their businesses in the near- to medium-term. But it is also worth remembering that MPS is also a strategy for greater business and transformational efficiencies as opposed to operational cost-efficiencies and cost-savings only.
Also, MPS can help mitigate risk, improve environmental credentials and transform business processes. For years, companies have ignored the mounting costs and growing inefficiencies of their print infrastructures, but the trend to MPS will make them look at this part of their business with fresh eyes.
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