Output Management: The Revolution That Started an Evolution

By Anthony King

The Misperception of a Printer

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Why does everyone have a stapler at their desk? Very few people use their stapler more than a few times a week, therefore a stapler spends 99% of its life sitting idle and unused. Is this cost effective? The reason is convenience, and the perceived cost of that convenience. Staplers are cheap to acquire and have cheap consumables. How motivated would your organization be to fund a study on the cost of desktop stapling?

Printers and other forms of printing technology have until recently be viewed as a device that performs a simple service, not unlike the stapler on your desk. Everyone has one on their desk, there are no standards for support or acquisition, and these devices are considered more like a piece of office equipment than a piece of information delivery technology. In many cases the same department that manage the acquisition of your staplers also purchase your printers and supplies.

The Output Revolution

Ten years ago, the revolution of the printer, copier and fax machine from three separate devices into a single multifunction device forced an evolution in thinking about this technology. Adopting this technology fuelled a political battle. This happened because historically, different departments handled the management of printers, faxes and copiers. This not only created support silos, but also masked the true costs of managing the organizations output technology. When it was time to integrate them, these groups were brought together for the first time; some light was finally cast on just how complicated and expensive it was to manage these devices.

Three different budgets needed to be integrated in to one. Service contracts needed to be renegotiated and in most cases service level agreements recreated from scratch. Several organizations faced challenges because the servicing of this new technology would need to be outsourced; therefore, internal jobs would need to be shuffled or eliminated and some collective agreements prohibited this action.

Integrating the separate fax, copy and printing systems into a single device raised questions about reliability. Questions about moving towards a technology with a possible single point of failure surfaced. This question forced further investigation and revealed just how many critical business functions these devices performed.

Finally, there was massive internal political conflict as the prospect of losing personal devices in favour of a more centrally located and shared device revealed the status one gained by having their own printer. Giving up this status generated significant resistance to the new technology. Many organizations had to water down or walk away from the integration of this technology even though it was obvious they would benefit from the move.

Output Management Chapter 1: "The science of that which accepts, or produces paper"

The Hard Costs
Why consolidate your printing fleet, integrate three services into one, and raise all the issues discussed earlier? The hard costs and environmental impact alone are impossible to ignore.

Carbon Footprint: This is a hot topic as the cost of producing power and its generation impacts our environment. More printers mean more cartridges to ship around, and dispose of later and more often. Unserviceable desktop printers wind up in land fills or filling storage rooms because there no clear process for disposal. Under utilized printers consume enormous amounts of power while producing very little. They also generate heat that must be managed by a power hungry air conditioning system. Heavy stacks of wasted paper must be shredded and trucked for disposal, consuming more power and fuel, also generating more heat.

Toner: The toner cartridge represents the largest reoccurring cost in the operation of a printer. The cost of manufacturing the cartridge typically exceeds the value of the toner it contains. This manufacturing challenge has created small cheap printers, usually found on the desktop, that contain toner cartridges that equal or exceed the price of the printer! The best way to eliminate this problem is to build a bigger cartridge with longer life components. This reduces your cost per page for the toner from 28 cents per page for a typical desktop printer down to less than 2 cents per page for a typical workgroup printer. The typical organization prints millions of pages of paper, so those savings add up to substantial dollars very quickly.

Power: A typical network printer consumes 900 watts while printing. This is the equivalent to fifteen household light bulbs for each network printer in your fleet! It usually takes a printer ten seconds to warm up while it draws this amount of power and about two seconds to generate the page, after that it will continue to run for an additional five seconds. While the printer is consuming this massive amount of power, it spends only 12% of the time actually producing anything. Printers only become power efficient when they are busy. The same printer producing a 100 page job would be producing 93% of the time it is drawing power. It you have a fleet of printers that are under utilized, the power waste will be costly.

Real Estate: The cost of office space continues to rise, and the density of staff in the office continues to rise. New office furniture tries to deal with this challenge by stacking your workspace vertically and eliminating costly desktop space. The space that a desktop printer takes is becoming too costly. Every Printer, Fax and Copier that is eliminated or consolidated into a multifunction device gives workspace back to the staff that needs it. A single network printer can service twenty staff members and consume less than half the space of one workstation.

Support Cost: One of the most expensive components to a printer's life is servicing. Small desktop printers have no remote management or diagnostic capabilities. If there is a problem, someone must visit onsite for even the most basic problem. This usually involves a third party support company and a flat fee for even the most basic problems; this fee can exceed the value of the printer! Finally if breaks, there are typically no serviceable components and the printer must be replaced. In most cases the printer has already been discontinued and must be replaced with a new model which now means an additional visit by another staff member to replace the printer and reconfigure the PC for the new device. Now the cost has far exceeded the original price of the printer. Not to mention the down time for the staff during this time.

Unreliable printers and PCs create the same end user perception of your IT Dept: The proper operation of your fleet of PCs is critical to your customer's perception that your IT department is competent. Constant PC failures would not be tolerated by any IT department, yet constant service of aged and failing printers is endured. Ironically a single PC failure impacts a single user, whereas a single printer failure can affect many customers.

Data Collection – It's not about Printers, it's about Business Services:

It's not enough to be a printer expert, you must also have a detailed understanding of what drives the business and what role each printer plays in operation of the organization you are evaluating before you start the data collection process.

Your Output Management expert should be sitting down with you learning about your infrastructure, business divisions, geography, internal support, contracts, seasonal requirements, and much more, before, they start assessing your location.

This is where many of the current managed print services available today fall short. An inventory of your printer, fax, and copier fleet is only one piece of data that needs to be collected to determine a usage and cost model. Different criteria about the usage of a device are required and are dependant on the business need for that device. Some examples of this criteria for a printer include paper type, size, hours of operation, potential background services that send scheduled jobs, label and envelope usage, and monthly volume of pages that the printer generates to name a few. Financial, Insurance, Healthcare, and Technology sectors all have different criteria and a different priority for each of them.

Printers, Faxes, Copiers, Scanners are not devices, they are services! Overlapping these devices is a waste of resources in most cases and should be avoided. However overlapping the services these devices provide to an area creates redundancy, load balancing, and lowers your service level requirements. You need to assess the services the devices in your fleet have available and more important, which of these are actually being used; don't buy again what you didn't use before.

Each printer needs to be evaluated individually so a proper usage model can be obtained. It is not enough to know how many you have; you need to know exactly where they are in relation to your staff, and each other. Once a proper cross section of usage data for the models for your printers has been obtained, only then will you find usage patterns within your organization. Then templates for deployment models specific to that business or department can be created when you start planning.

Formulating the Plan – Design the Assembly Line:

Vendors first, followed later by some consulting firms have created managed print services, and evaluations to guide a business through the development of a output management strategy, but in many cases these services try to reuse a template of a single printing model aimed at consolidating devices without in-depth analysis of how an organization uses the equipment.

When considering your print management strategy, these devices do not simply generate paper but represent the end of an assembly line of business processes that terminate with a page being produced by the printer. Optimally, any document created digitally should move throughout your organization digitally until at the end of its lifecycle it is archived digitally with no hardcopy required. This is the ultimate goal of an enterprise Output Management Strategy. This is not achieved easily or quickly, but this process can be broken down into phases. Each phase has its own return on investment to make the process financially attractive: the first phase finishing with device consolidation. This is the first and only plan you should tackle first. Don't try and build a document management strategy until you have your printing house in order.

One of the most common mistakes when developing a strategy is to place a target percentage value on the amount of consolidation the project wants to achieve across the organization: 20%,40%, 65%. A better approach is to look at the current 'users to printer' ratio for each department or business unit and evaluate where the number of devices can be reduced, or in some cases increased. Once all the data has been collected for each business unit, you will have the current ratios and can more easily generate the future ratios. This will also allow you to calculate an accurate cost savings that will be achieved for the printer consolidation phase of your strategy.

The chart below, illustrates the importance of looking closely at your entire organization as each business has different needs. Look at how the 'users to printer' ratios vary across different business units within an organization. In this case a great improvement in the user to printer ratio was achieved across the organization, but the ratio varied across the business units. In some cases the results exceeded this initial assessment and other fell short, but the ultimate goal was exceeded.

The Number of 'Users per Printer' across different business units of the same company:

Site Type	Number of Staff	Original Ratio (Users per Printer)	New Ratio Recommended in Initial Assessment	New Ratio Achieved
Business Unit A	350	0.8	2.4	2.3
Business Unit B	2200	1.9	3.5	5.4
Business Unit C	500	6.1	7.0	9.3
Business Unit D	300	1.4	7.0	4.6
Business Unit E	1600	2.2	7.0	4.9
Business Unit F	400	1.6	3.5	1.45
Corp Average	5350	1.9	4.3	5.08

Finally, for any Output Management strategy to work it must have the approval and support from the very top of your organization. In the initial stages of the implementation there can be significant change to the working environment. These are positive changes, but people generally have a resistance to change or feel that they are being singled out. This will no doubt generate discussion that will move up through the organization. In order for the plan to succeed the team must know they have the complete support of the executive team to make decisions that will not be reversed by management. If the leadership within your organization sends a message that they are comfortable and confident with change, the rest of the staff will follow.

Implementation – Convincing the Masses:

The implementation must always start from the top. This continues to build trust in the plan throughout the organization. If you can tell a staff member that the CEO lost their personal printer first, it does not leave much of an argument when they feel they are being singled out. This also ensures that your executive is clear about the process, impact and can communicate with confidence the benefits gained by the changes.

Your Team: You will need to build a team for assessment and deployment of the new fleet. In most organizations the implementation will take more than a year to complete. With a number of steps to complete in sequence, each member will rely on the other to complete their part of the process. If someone misses a step the whole process is stalled. Therefore it is important to maintain this team for the duration of the deployment. The knowledge gained with each deployment will continue to refine the process and build efficiency. Rotating staff out of the team disrupts this flow. If maintaining the team is not an option, build a mentoring process into the rotation that extends over several deployments to ensure the new staff member is comfortable in their role.

Training your staff: Your trainers are critical to the success of the rollout. They are your sales people. They are selling the benefits of change, the new features and tools available to your staff. This is not a place to short-cut or cut your budget. This is also not a role for a technician, they may have the knowledge to operate the device but they are not professional trainers. It is essential that you have full time trainers and a flexible training schedule. The new equipment can be intimidating to your staff who will already be dealing with a disruption to their work environment. Good training will leave your staff with more confidence to move on, and a better message to deliver when others ask about their experience. Equally important is to train your helpdesk before you start your deployment, if fact your Helpdesk should be one of your pilot sites.

The Pilot Phase: It is essential to give the team time to build a solid process. The pilot should be composed of a cross section of different business units as well as geographic locations if applicable. This is also where you can refine your timeline, and expect that timeline to shift as the pilot proceeds. In my experience, most organizations vastly underestimate the time and effort required to complete the implementation.

You will need an Output Management Expert: This person has knowledge of industry which will be invaluable during the vendor evaluation, testing and purchase of equipment, not to mention contract negotiations. They will be with you for the duration of the project development through to the end of the deployment. They are not only your technology and process expert, but must also be able to negotiate and deliver the plan to your site management and staff during the assessment phase. As an external consultant they can assess each location impartially and provide third-party knowledge of other organizations challenges and solutions. They will meet with your management at each location well in advance of the implementation to assess each location, present the new configuration and address any concerns before the site is refreshed. They are not the project manager but a partner with the PM to ensure the goals of the project are achieved.

Benefits – No Brainer

Obviously the challenges noted earlier were improved upon or eliminated completely, however there are additional benefits to enjoy at the completion of this phase of your output management strategy.

Remote Management: One of the top benefits to converting exclusively to network attached printing is the remote access to the device. Your service desk now has immediate access to the current status of the device. This avoids multiple costly visits to the device to diagnose the problem. More important the devices now report their performance and preventative maintenance so that proactive steps can be taken to optimize the fleet and improve the customer experience while reducing costs, a rare combination.

Operating Cost: The operating cost savings can be significant; in the case of the company discussed above, the chart below details their savings during the last year of a two year rollout, and the expected savings each year for the next two years after that.

Operating and Capital Savings for Printing Infrastructure Support:

Year	1 (Final Year of Project)	2	3
Operational Savings (Toner and Service)	$180,000	$400,000	$400,000
Total Savings+ (Leases, Capital Exp, Etc.)	$200,000	$1,100,000	$1,900,000

Helpdesk Benefits: Expect a significant reduction in helpdesk calls. The chart below details the actual calls to helpdesk with printer related calls. More importantly, over 90% of these calls were solved on the phone. One of the key reasons for the high success rate over the phone was the reduction in printer models to support. Before the printer refresh, there were over two hundred different models of printers to support, with little or no training. After the completion of the rollout, there were only eight different models and the helpdesk had been fully trained on all the devices.

Total Print Related Helpdesk Calls Per Month:

Month	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug	Sept	Oct	Nov	Dec
Calls in 2007	329	241	319	254	238	242	226	277	222	311	300	230
Calls in 2008	319	244	203	235	188	206	239	205	223	286	203	219
%Chg	-3%	1%	-36%	-7%	-21%	-15%	6%	-26%	0%	-8%	-23%	-5%

Conclusion – "Do We Need To Print This?"

The price of real estate will continue to climb and the price of electronic storage will continue to fall. This is the constant that will drive your output management strategy. Why should anyone pay to store and then shred information in a digital era. When developing an output management strategy, you are not only upgrading your printer fleet but also creating a platform to transition your organization from an ad-hoc printing environment to a business that has a fully integrated document and workflow management system. Creating a synergy between people, print, scan and archiving technologies. Ultimately your strategy succeeds when the staff in your organization start asking the question, "Do we need to print this?"