Cutting Costs and Maximizing the Return on Your Imaging and Output Assets
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
New, powerful document distribution and management advances place imaging and output resources in an important role within critical business processes. These processes may be vertical, such as brokerage accounts, insurance claims, and FDA drug applications, or horizontal, such as invoicing and HR documentation. As a result of these trends, imaging and output resources are now being included in efforts to align business goals with IT and in efforts to maximize the return on all IT resources.
The process of optimizing the imaging and output infrastructure inevitably reveals unnecessarily high costs and underutilized assets. Indeed, for this White Paper we studied nine large enterprises in the United States, Europe, and Asia and found the majority of organizations studied reported major problems related to overall cost awareness of their imaging hardware, their ability to assess device utilization, and high costs of maintaining an often aged and out-of-date fleet of printers, copiers, and multifunction devices. Based on the experiences of these nine companies and other IDC research, this White Paper looks at the unnecessary costs and inefficiencies that typically exist within these resources and the significant opportunities to achieve cost savings, boost employee productivity, and speed up core business processes from tighter integration between the document advances of hardcopy devices and business process workflows.
"Managed print services" may help companies rein in an insidious expense
Making copies isn't brain surgery, but at Florida's Health First chain of hospitals it had become what chief information officer Richard Rogers describes as a "convoluted mess." Nursing stations were overrun by copiers, fax machines, and printers, taking up precious counter space and impeding day-to-day operations.
If getting to (or away from) the machines was a chore, so too was keeping them running. There was no consistent process for ordering toner — departments purchased from a range of suppliers, sometimes buying poor-quality reconditioned cartridges. Some nursing units stocked up on a year's supply at a time, others bought on a more ad hoc basis, and no one knew what anyone else had on hand.
Rogers sought a cure in so-called managed print services, a form of outsourcing that addresses the rationalization of office equipment and its maintenance. Lexmark International won the bid, and its consultants set about analyzing document output patterns throughout the company. They replaced many single-function machines with strategically placed multifunction devices that print, copy, scan, and fax. They also rolled out a system that automatically reorders supplies when needed with no hospital-staff involvement. As a result, Rogers says that hard costs alone have dropped from 3.1 cents per image to 1.4 cents per image.
