The last Bastion of Unaudited Cost

I first heard the phrase ‘the last bastion of unaudited cost’ many years ago before the idea of Managed Print Services (MPS) ever came into existence.  Is it true ?  In our world today with all of its checks and balances; all of the control and scrutiny of every last penny spent, could there possibly be an area of cost that we cannot absolutely and unequivocally assign an accurate cost too  !  Well yes actually there is and it is office printing.

The cause of the confusion lies in the way organisations buy and operate printing equipment. Traditionally printing equipment, and I include multi-functional devices (MFDs) in that category, have been the responsibility of a number of different departments within most organisation. The procurement of printers has almost exclusively been the province of the IT department. MFDs or copiers the responsibility of the procurement or facilities management departments, and the biggest cost of all, consumables, the remit of the departments using the equipment. My experience across both the public and commercial sectors is that it is an extremely rare occurrence to find someone who can pull together all of the relevant costs and produce an accurate picture of the costs involved. Indeed, it is very rare to find an organisation of size that can tell me how many devices they have and where they reside. It is common practice to take the figure stated and add 50% to that in order to plan the time and resources required to audit the fleet…and I have rarely been far out on the final figure. The issue is, of course, that the costs for procurement and operation aren’t linked and, so long as the individual departments are within budget, nobody ever bothers to look any further. Hence it really is fair to say the the true cost of office printing really is the last bastion of unaudited cost. There is another factor that comes into the equation as well. Staff never associate printing with cost. After all you press a button and a piece of paper pops out of a machine. Paper costs next to nothing doesn’t it ! Consider then that the European Commission has conducted studies that suggest up to 15% of company revenue is spent on document processing. Up to 5% of company revenue is spent on printing alone. That’s vast, in a small company with a £10m turnover that means up to £500,000 is spent on printing…and nobody knows about it ! Any other area of expense as large as this would be the subject of major scrutiny and rightly so. The question is ‘what can we do about it’. The answer is ‘quite a lot actually’. There are facilities and systems out in the market today that allow you to regain control of your printing environment. There are systems that bring visibility and accountability so you can see who printed what, where and when. There are systems that allow you to ensure only work related printing takes place on fewer devices and that confidentiality is maintained. And there are systems that allow quick and accurate diagnosis of technical faults to be brought to the attention of those who need to know quickly wherever they may be and however large or distributed the fleet is. Over the coming weeks I will be looking at the various elements involved in regaining control of your print environment. We will see how they build into a cohesive Managed Print Service that will benefit your business by being as fresh on the last day as it was on the day it was designed.

Next time ‘Why do we all have a printer on our desk?’