Print Investigations

 

How much do you think your organisation as a whole is spending on office printing and copying each year?

If you don't know, don't worry - you have this in common with the vast majority of UK businesses. According to Buyers Laboratory, 90% of all companies do not track their printing costs.

Yet, recent research by Gartner revealed between 1% and 3% of your annual expenditure is actually spent on this often over looked cost base.

This is likely to be a very substantial part of your business overhead, second only to your staffing costs, and should certainly be a prime target for cost reduction in the current economic environment.

Typically, companies that don't consider the output environment to be a core asset usually produce the largest output volume and waste the most money.

In most organisations today, the output environment – or the environment made up of output devices such as printers, copiers, fax machines and scanners – has evolved over time with no conscious plan or strategy for its growth or management. In the absence of a strategy, devices have been acquired on an ad hoc basis, with no central control over purchasing decisions.

Often, such decisions have been made based on the cost to acquire the devices or what was available within Petty Cash (especially as purchase prices have continued to drop in recent years), with no real attention to the long-term costs of owning them. Little thought has been given to whether devices have outlived their usefulness or what to do with them when they have.

Effective business management must include the management of all assets, not merely core assets. Many companies now realise that if they cannot measure the cost of printing, they cannot manage it.

Xerox/IDC research from 2003 reports that 53% of UK organisations do not track document costs and only 10% of board level executives can give estimates on what it is costing their business. Without doubt, one of the most uncontrolled overheads in any business structure is the cost of your print output.

Contact us now or see how the Print Investigation process enables you to reduce costs and gain control of your Output Environment.