The cost of printing and maintaining a printer system is widely under estimated. If you paused to think about the amount of money you spend on toner, paper, electricity, maintenance and then the percentage of salary that you are paying employees to stand idly waiting for a printer to spit out their files. When you start adding thing up on the calculator the numbers can have a lot more zeros on the end than you might have first thought.
The key is to know and recognize the difference between print and non-print related costs. How to stop this increase in cost lies in establishing a printing management system that works for your company and the only way to do that it to really take a good look at the numbers.
Hard costs, or print costs, are the upfront fees you pay for toner, paper, maintenance and repairs, finishing, shipping, storing and the fulfillment of your printing machine. These are the costs that are obvious that you get the bills for each month, but they are not the only costs printing incurs.
The secondary costs that can accrue when dealing with printing in office are known as soft costs. Soft costs include design, composition, editing, project management and administration. These are harder to quantifiably measure because they mostly have to do with measuring how much your time and energy is worth. Essentially they represent the efficiency cost.
A quick calculation shows what we mean:
10 Minutes/Job x 50 Jobs/Day = 500 Minutes x $30/Hr = $250/Day
$250/Day x 19 Work Days/Month = $4,750/Month x 12 = $57,000/Year
One of the best ways to lower these numbers is though making efficiency a primary goal for the office. Actions are repeated, the employees are accidentally stepping on each other and repeating tasks and while everyone is trying to figure out who is doing what you are losing time and money. One machine in particular that helps to implement and maintain efficiency is a multifunction printer or an MFP as well as a managed print service, or, MPS.
While implementing an MPS or MFP won’t be a cure-all for every office issue, it will certainly help to streamline a very important part of the business process. As per the calculations above, running an office with no clear structure for cost or management of expenses can be an expensive mistake and chances are all that money could be put to better use in other areas of the business.
It’s time to create a system to record your frequency of printing, digitization rate, toner use, paper consumption and repair costs. An MPS and MFP are a very good way to do this because of their tracking capabilities. The numbers gathered by these two upgrades will create a benchmark to work from each month or year to reduce printing costs.
The cost of printing can be high, but the right approach and the right tools can bring your spending back in line and help your office improve and grow in the most efficient and productive way.
Click here to find out how your business can save up to 30% in print costs in 30 days:
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