Reducing waste and cutting costs is becoming increasingly important for companies, even five years after the global financial crash wiped out many businesses.
Organisations are more aware than ever of the need to avoid wasting money and this is why efficiently techniques such as lean manufacturing have come to the fore in recent years.
While printing might not be one of the main things to leap to mind when considering wastage within a company, people may be surprised to learn just how much money could be saved by taking measures to become more efficient.
Managed print services is one such tactic organisations are now using to cut their costs and become more lean, with research by OKI indicating that print spending can be slashed by as much as 30 per cent by those who sign up to the plan.
How does it work?
Companies that are concerned about how much they are spending on printing may find managed print services helps them to get a grip of their costs.
By conducting a full and thorough assessment of the firm’s print strategy, it becomes possible to identify where waste is occurring, for instance which devices are not being used as much as they could be.
Then companies are able to get rid of those devices that are not being fully utilised – which may include scanners and copiers as well as printers – and invest in new technology such as multifunction printers to become more efficient.
Businesses need to place an increasing amount of importance on their impact on the environment too and managed print services can help with this too. By slimming down how many devices an office is running, companies can cut their carbon footprint, reduce their energy bills and make major cost savings as a result.
Tailored plans
One of the main benefits of managed print services, indeed one of the main reasons it has become more popular in recent years, is the fact that plans can be tailored to the individual needs of an organisation.
Each business that signs up to managed print services gets a detailed analysis of where waste is occurring, as well as a roadmap to a better way of printing documents in the workplace.
With OKI’s research indicating that the average office worker prints out 10,000 pages a year, it’s clear that reducing these costs can be a great way for businesses to cut their spending.
The paperless office?
Although commentators like to talk about buzz trends such as the paperless office, it’s quite clear from OKI’s research that this is a long way off for a lot of companies.
Even though the dominance of the cloud has reduced the need to print out so many documents, as they can instead be stored online via facilities such as Google Drive, many offices are still heavily reliant on paper and this is likely to be the case for many years in the future.
With this in mind, organisations will have to consider how else they are able to cut the cost of their printing spending, reducing their overall outgoings and improving efficiency.
Printing costs
Even more alarmingly than the statistic on how much the average worker prints is OKI’s finding that only 20 per cent of members of staff are using both sides of the paper, which immediately means twice as much paper is being used than is necessary.
OKI also found that ten per cent of an organisation’s total printing costs lies in hardware, consumables, maintenance, paper and power – which shows the sorts of areas companies should be targeting.
Managed print services from OKI helps businesses to slash their print bills by up to 30 per cent – which can prove to have a massive impact on the bottom line of an organisation over many years.