Economic Impact

According to the Gartner Group, office printing consumes 1-3% of a company’s annual revenue. This means that a $10 million company will spend between $100 - $300K this year alone. To make matters worse, overall print volumes are growing at a rate of 11% annually and color print usage continues to grow at 19% per year. This is especially important since color prints cost 5 to 10 times the amount of monochrome prints. On top of the growing costs, most companies that we work with had multiple vendors for printer hardware, supplies and repairs. Managing those relationships and processing multiple invoices led to unnecessary costs.

Environmental Impact

Office printing also has a tremendous impact on the environment. The average office employee consumes 10,000 pages of paper per year. Since a single tree yields 8,333 sheets of letter sized paper, an average worker consumes 1.2 trees per year. Add to that the greenhouse gasses emitted by the heavy equipment and paper mills used to make paper. Multiply that across your organization and you can see that printing can have a tremendous impact on the environment. Printers and copiers also consume a tremendous amount of electricity since they use heat during the print process to fuse the toner to the paper. Fortunately, companies that optimize their print environments save money on electricity.

Productivity Impact

Printing also affects the productivity of your company. Delivering documents to the correct location at the right time is at the heart of many workflows. Inefficient, aging printers are prone to breakdown, hampering office effectiveness. The neglect of proper preventative maintenance not only leads to interrupted workflows, it also reduces the usable lifecycle of the printer.

IT Impact

IT departments are also impacted by inefficient printing infrastructures. It is estimated that in some organizations, up to 50% of the help desk calls are related to printers. Since printers are mechanical devices, many of these calls require an IT person to go to the printer. Often, the problem with the printer is mechanical, meaning that the IT person has to call in a third party to repair the device. This problem is further compounded by multiple brands and models of printers. Each one has a different print driver and user interface that has to be updated each time Microsoft updates their operating systems.

Perhaps the biggest impact is that printers distract your expensive IT resources from critical corporate initiatives. Creating a strategy to outsource printer management can help you control your IT costs.

A Better Way

Fortunately, there is a better way. The executives we work with were excited to learn about our managed print services strategy that helps them manage expenses, boost productivity and free up IT resources along with minimizing their carbon footprint.

  1. "Printer and Copier Fleets: The Goldmine in the Hallway,” Gartner Group
  2. Lyra Research
  3. “Assessing and Benchmarking Document Costs,” InfoTrends/ALL Associates
  4. www.printgreener.com

Consider the facts:

  • 3% of annual revenues are consumed by office printing
  • Print volumes grow at 11% per year
  • The average office worker consumes 10,000 pages per year
  • A 100 person office will consume 1,200 trees over the next 12 years
  • As many as half of IT help desk calls relate to printing