Spiraling Printing Costs
Few business administrators realize the extent that out-of-control printing costs are stressing the budget. Most administrators don't know how the organization's printers are really being used and thus can't control printing costs.
But doing the math highlights the need to shrink the perennial budget drain of wasted printing resources. Multiply the number of the organization's printers (black/white, color, and laser) by the number of staff printing on them; by the size, type, and number of daily print jobs -- and you get a massive figure in paper, ink, toner, printer wear-and-tear, and technical support expenditures. Dataquest figures show that the average cost of producing documents is equivalent to 40% of a company's labor cost. Other industry analysts estimate the total cost of printing to run between five and 15 percent of a company's annual revenues.
What makes costs grow exponentially is the number of wasteful or non-businessrelated print jobs that should never be printed, or could be copied more economically. This runs the gamut from unnecessary color printing, JPEG photos, and fantasy football scores to multiple copies of 1,000-page PDF files when a few pages would suffice, the printout doesn't immediately appear, or cheaper hardbound copies already exist.
The problem is that personally monitoring every staff member's print outs for business relevance is intrusive, labor intensive, and can disrupt more important tasks.
Printer manufacturers, for their part, often build some control functions into their printers. But these controls are typically limited to their brand or an individual machine, and thus not effective in most business environments, which tend to use multiple printer brands across their networks. Moreover because printer manufacturers essentially sell inkjet and low-end laser printers as loss-leaders to generate a high-margin revenue stream from consumable ink, toner and paper, relying on them to control printing costs is akin to putting the fox in charge of guarding the henhouse.
Since other software-based solutions aren't native to the Microsoft Windows Operating System commonly used on business print servers, they're also susceptible to software instability and unwanted complexity. Despite the huge expense of uncontrolled printing on profits, most corporations view it as "the cost of doing business" since it's impossible to control without the right information and tools.