www.Ipmgroup.ca

Many organizations have been tasked with “greening IT” meaning they must find ways to reduce the environmental impacts they are having through their IT activities. At first one might not think that a print or document output strategy would be somewhere to gain environmental efficiencies yet time after time Independent Print Management Group (IPMG) clients have reduced their e-waste, their paper consumption and their power usage by implementing an effective document output strategy. Let’s look at each of these categories individually.

E-waste generally refers to the disposal of electronic hardware associated with an organizations network…servers, cabling, monitors and printers, copiers and fax machines and their associated supplies, such as cartridges and fuser kits, all fall into the category. Many organizations do not have a clear strategy on how to dispose of these items. When it comes to printers and fax machines several vendors do in fact have eco-friendly ways to dispose of these items however if not they are often passed from one workgroup to another and may eventually end up in an employee’s home office and eventually find their way to landfill. New methods of recycling are available that actually grind up these devices and sort plastic from metal, recycling 98% of the device. These recycling companies have full security for verification purposes and can send the client video of their waste from pick up to the final stages of recycling.

Paper consumption is still on the rise….this after years of hype about the paperless office. Why is this? Certainly with email and other technologies helping us not to print these paper consumption numbers should be going down not up, yet print volumes continue to rise. There are a couple of reasons for this.

Firstly, end users are often not aware of the technologies available to them that can reduce paper consumption. Features such as scan-to-email and scan-to-file can reduce paper usage. So can faxing from the desktop. Instead of creating a document, printing it, scanning into a fax machine then printing at the other end users can simply create and send electronically to a fax board in an MFD. After that step the fax is simply sent to the receiving unit.

Another big paper waster is people accidentally picking up part of someone else’s print job at the shared network printer. When this happens, more often than not, the person who is missing part of their document will reprint the entire print job and dispose of the partial print job. Secure printing allows users to call up one or all of their print jobs at the device and eliminates the problem.

Setting standards for duplexing also works well as long as it is understood that certain workgroups will need to print documents in simplex mode on a regular basis. The default to duplex should be discussed with each workgroup before it is implemented.

Finally, a strong communication strategy that keeps staff aware of the organizations paper reduction goals can go a long way. Simple messaging embedded in email headers and other documents such as “Please consider the environment before printing this document” constantly remind users to think twice about printing.

With regard to power consumption the vast majority of organizations do not know how much power their print and copy fleets are consuming. There is a misconception that “sleep mode” or “stand-by mode” uses very little power. In fact these modes are intended to keep fuser rollers at a temperature that will permit the device to warm up to operating temperature in a reasonable amount of time. This makes complete sense during working hours but not so much at night time.

IPMG (www.ipmgroup.ca) has measured power consumption for clients before and after the implementation of a print strategy. The results have been a 50% reduction in power consumption simply by installing the correct number of devices, and programming all capable devices to turn off at night.

Short run colour printing was introduced to the market in the early nineties when California’s Electronics for Imaging (EFI) produced a colour print server named Fiery to operate with a digital colour copier manufactured by Canon. Before this all colour printing was done on traditional presses. The purchase price of these systems could easily exceed $100,000.00 and the cost per page for service was 25 cents, and that did not include toner. Most of these systems were purchased by copy shops that could then offer colour copying and printing to the public.

During the past 15 years virtually every manufacturer of printers or photocopiers has developed an offering of colour imaging devices that varies from small inkjet devices that are often given away at very low cost to high speed digital presses that you will find installed at large printing companies.

Although the cost of colour printing in the office has been significantly reduced over the years it should still be an area of concern for most organizations if they do not have a handle on actual costs.

So just what is the cost of colour printing? And what direction should your organization take when it comes to procurement policies on colour printing?

Simply put, devices that are copier based will generally run on a cost per page basis of somewhere between seven and ten cents per impression depending on volume and the device itself can be purchased, rented or leased. The per page cost includes supplies and service on the device.

Printer based devices generally operate with a separate contract for service and the user is responsible for the purchase of supplies. Again the device can be purchased, which is usually the case, rented or leased. The cost of printing on these types of devices is directly related to the amount of toner that is fused onto each page and can therefore vary significantly. We have seen costs as low as one cent and as high as 45 cents.

One of my very first clients told me that he was constantly being approached by vendors to change from colour printers to colour copiers so he could save money. When he conducted his print strategy we were able to determine that, in fact, his costs of colour printing were extremely low because the vast majority of the colour pages that were being printed were simple letterhead with a very small colour logo using very little colour toner and the majority of the image was black text.

Had this client switched to copier based colour devices his costs would have increased significantly. However other clients that we have worked with have been using much more toner for colour printing and can benefit from a change in technology.

The bottom line is you must understand your present costs in order to make an informed decision on colour printing.

Next week – Greening IT with a Print Strategy

I would like to focus my first blog on why IPMG was formed and why independence is important for our clients.

I worked in the imaging industry for twenty years and I was responsible for selling hardware to clients. During the 1990’s as our products (photocopiers) became digital it was clear that they could be networked and used as high speed printers, scanners and even fax machines…multi-functional devices (MFDs) for short. This opened up a new market, one that was previously dominated by the printer companies and the Company encouraged the sales force to offer free assessments to customers with a view to offering a cost saving solution… heavily weighted with our own products of course. The result would be more images being produced on our products…did you know that the majority of revenue for copier companies comes from the “click rate” that you are charged for toner and service?

These offerings, often free, are still available today however the savings generated are not as great as what an independent company can generate. This is because the independent company, having no affiliation with a hardware vendor, can design a mixed deployment of copier-based products and traditional printer products…making sure the right device is installed in the right place. In fact, in the vast majority of cases the savings generated by IPMG are twice that of a hardware vendor.

As a hardware sales representative I found many clients reluctant to commit to the free assessment offering, and I shortly realized that the client did not want a biased opinion from one of their sales reps. They were already hearing all sorts of conflicting opinions from all sorts of different vendors and with all the confusion making informed decisions about their print strategies was very difficult for them. Simply put, assessments by a vendor selling a specific product will quite likely result in a new design heavily weighted with that vendor’s products.

I left the imaging industry to start a company that offered independent advice to clients that would genuinely help the client arrive at the right decisions. I couldn’t find much on the internet and in my naivety I honestly thought that my new company, Digital Print Strategies, was the only independent out there. I later learned an old colleague of mine, Bruce Farrant, was operating The More Group in Toronto and offering a very similar service. We merged the two companies in 2004 to form IPMG with a view to offering national coverage.

From the day IPMG was formed the principals of the Company agreed that one thing would override everything else…We will maintain our independence at any cost. While at times this belief has cost us short-term revenue we always believed that being completely independent would gain the respect of our clients as well as that of the vendors that we ultimately must interface with. “The cream will rise to the top” was repeated in nearly every one of our strategy meetings and sure enough, five years on, it has all come to fruition. IPMG has been able to follow our principles of independence and gain the admiration of clients and vendors alike while becoming Canada’s premier independent supplier of print strategies.

Next week I will be blogging on controlling the costs of colour printing…in the meantime please forward any questions that you might have to:

kwhitehead@ipmgroup.ca