How To Be a Hero: Saving Money, Improving IT Productivity, and Reducing your Carbon Footprint
Ed Crowley, CEO and Sr. Partner – Photizo Group
IT managers are facing a difficult environment right now. You are being asked to lead organizational change by implementing business process improvements. At the same time you are being asked to reduce staff, or at least utilize existing staff with no incremental investment. And on top that, you still have to keep your internal end users happy, who are also under considerable pressure to deliver more results.
Gone are the days when you were measured by your ability to procure and implement the latest technology for your firm. Now you are being measured by your ability to improve the business and ring the most possible out of the existing technology infrastructure. Many IT executives and managers feel that they are being set-up for failure in this particular environment.
What if I told you there’s a way to be a hero by saving your firm significant amounts of money, that you could free up your IT staff from menial support tasks to focus on mission critical business enhancements, while significantly reducing your firms carbon footprint. And now you’re free to focus upon strategic, core business IT initiatives. In short, how would you like to be a hero?
Before I give you the secret, I’m going to make a few assumptions about your firm. If you are like most firms, then you have an average of one imaging device (printer, copier, multifunction/MFP, or fax machine) for every two employees. These devices cost your firm an average of $3M per year to operate. This will be true even if you have a centralized procurement strategy. Supporting these devices requires an average of 10 percent of the typical IT organization’s staff time. Installing drivers, calling for service, managing print authorizations, and other low skill level tasks are a constant drain on your resources. Finally, the hardcopy devices are using 156,604 KWhs of electricity per year and producing 890,371 pounds of C02 per year.
Clearly, the actual data for your firm will vary depending upon your organization’s size, the industry you are in (yes, if you are a legal firm you do generate a lot more paper), and a number of other factors. However, when the Photizo Group analyzed data from 105 firms in North America, they found amazing consistency in the over-saturation of imaging devices. This was true for firms ranging in sizes from 50 employees to over 40,000 employees.
Now, here is the secret to becoming a hero. These 105 firms all achieved significant organization results by implementing an outsourcing arrangement called managed print services. The firms turned over the ongoing planning, support, and management of their hardcopy fleet to external vendors. These managed print services vendors took on responsibility for not only reducing the initial cost of the fleet, but also for the ongoing proactive management of the fleet.
By analyzing data prior the firm’s implementation of an Managed Print Services program and after the implementation the Photizo Group was able to discover several vital trends:
- By working with the managed print services vendor, the firms were able to reduce the number of devices and improve their employee to device ratio by a factor of three to over six employees per device. This resulted in an annual savings of $1M per year, or 33% of the total cost of operating the fleet.
- Through managed print services, firm’s were also able to free up 10% of their IT staff’s time to focus on mission critical initiatives, instead of supporting hardcopy devices.
- And perhaps just as importantly, the firms involved in a managed print services engagement managed to reduce their carbon footprint and electrical usage for the imaging fleet by an average of 60%.
Saving money, improving IT productivity, and reducing your firm’s carbon footprint –it’s not hard to argue that achieving these results will make you a hero in almost any executives eyes! But, what does it take to implement managed print services, and isn’t this the same type of cost per copy contract many copier salesmen have been selling for years?
Managed print services is not a simple cost per copy contract. Nor, is it just about ‘rightsizing’ the device fleet to make sure you have the optimal number of staff members to hardcopy devices. Managed print services is about engaging with a vendor who will manage your device fleet, processes, and strategies to ensure you are obtaining maximum business productivity while addressing your internal customers needs.
Stages of a Managed Print Services Engagement
There are three basic stages to any managed print services engagement. The first stage involves gaining control of the fleet by understanding user requirements, measuring usage, and building a plan to ensure devices are deployed in an optimal manner. The second stage includes redeploying the fleet to ensure it is being used in an optimal manner and then managing it on an on-going basis to ensure the devices continue to be used in an optimal manner. The third stage in a managed print services engagement involves optimizing business processes by analyzing existing processes and implementing document workflow and document management to achieve optimal process efficiency.
It’s important to note that any managed print services engagement involves proactive and ongoing management of the fleet. This is not a one time ‘fix’, but rather an on-going engagement with a services provider, who provides an outsourced solution. Typically a managed print services agreement includes equipment, services, software, supplies, and even on-site staffing. Instead of measuring the vendors performance on cost per page or the price of hardware, vendor performance is defined and measured based upon a service level agreement.
A managed print services agreement uses items such as ensuring a specific level of quality, or user access, or device uptime to ensure the end-users needs are being met while your management objectives are also being met. Because of the tremendous benefits to a managed print services arrangement, small and large organizations are moving to manage print services agreements instead of the traditional purchase model. In fact, the Photizo Group estimates that by 2013 over 50% of all devices installed in business will be under a managed print services contract.
So, are your resources being tied up in managing hard copy assets? Are you feeling the pressure of being asked to do more with less? If you truly want to be a hero, consider transitioning your organization to a managed print services environment.
