Sorting out the printing device ‘zoo’

Sorting out the printing device ‘zoo’
By Jessica Twentyman

Published: March 18 2010 16:30 | Last updated: March 18 2010 16:30

Straight-talking James De Watteville doesn’t mince his words when it comes to describing his company’s sprawling estate of printing devices. ”It’s a zoo,” he says, ”and it needs sorting out.”

That “zoo” is populated by around 1,000 printers, serving 8,000 people across 22 different sites in the UK. Some of the devices are ancient, some are unreliable. A complex mesh of maintenance agreements and in-house resources are dedicated to their care and attention. It is far too expensive.

Mr De Watteville is chief information officer of insurance company RSA (formerly Royal Sun Alliance), and he describes a situation that will sound familiar to many IT bosses, according to Louella Fernandes, an analyst with IT market research company Quocirca.

”Many print environments still have a tangled mix of old and new equipment, both over and underutilised, leading to high costs due to the variety of consumables (both storage and procurement) as well as the financial and environmental costs associated with paper, ink, toner and energy consumption,” she says.

”Often, management and procurement of the printing infrastructure is distributed across locations and geographies, with no centralised tracking system to monitor and analyse costs.”

The true cost of unmanaged printing can startle businesses, she says. Industry estimates suggest companies spend between 1 and 3 per cent of their annual revenues on maintaining printer estates. Analysts at Gartner, meanwhile, estimate that using managed print services [MPS] can reduce that by between 10 and 30 per cent.

”Under MPS, a service provider takes primary responsibility for meeting the customer’s office printing needs, including the printing equipment, the supplies, the service and overall management of the printer fleet,” Gartner’s report explain.

”The main components provided are a needs assessment, selective or general replacement of hardware, and the services and supplies needed to operate the new and/or existing hardware.”

MPS services also extend to the kinds of high-volume printing requirements typically provided by an internal reprographics department or, alternatively, a third-party printing provider, says Carsten Bruhn, vice president of Ricoh Global Service Europe.

In a recent conversation with a large organisation in Finland, he was told that materials such as marketing documents were typically outsourced to a third party, who insisted on minimum print volumes for each project. Now, under that company’s MPS deal with Ricoh, it outsources that requirement to Ricoh, which prints as many – or as few – copies as needed, allowing the company to customise materials for customers in different markets.

Mr De Watteville at RSA hopes that a newly signed MSP contract will alleviate many of the headaches he and his team face. During the first quarter of 2010, printer manufacturer Kyocera Mita will begin replacing RSA’s printer estate with 375 multi-function devices, reducing the ratio of printers-to-people from 1:8 to 1:21.

Kyocera Mita will also take over the management of the refreshed estate, relieving RSA staff of the burden. Mr De Watteville says that, as a result, the company’s spend on printing over the next five years will shrink from £7.5m to £2.5m.

At the same time, the new MPS contract will help RSA meet key environmental targets, says Paul Pritchard, RSA’s UK head of corporate responsibility. ”Fewer printers mean reduced energy consumption – but it will help us drive some important behavioural changes in the area of paper consumption as well.”

The company’s efforts to encourage staff to print on both sides of paper have only been partially successful, he explains. Some of the current machines don’t even allow it but the new multi-function devices will have double-sided printing as the default option.

According to Gartner, MPS have so far only penetrated between 5 and 20 per cent of the target market. Very large organisations are the ones likely to gain most benefits from MPS, they say, ”because they probably have a widely dispersed printing environment with big potential for print optimisation”. But all can benefit.

However, companies appear to struggle to choose the right MPS provider, says Gartner analyst Ken Weilerstein. Definitions of the services on offer vary, he says, and MPS providers’ websites typically provide only vague indications of what the vendors do. ”In part [this is] because MPS tends to be more customised than print hardware.”

The problem, he says, is getting worse as new kinds of MPS providers emerge, including most of the printer/copier manufacturers and dealers and even office supplies wholesalers.

To emphasise its role in the market, Hewlett-Packard has launched a global business unit called Managed Enterprise Services (MES), with a view to boosting its MPS offering. This will be led by Bruce Dahlgren, an HP senior vice president, and draws heavily on resources acquired in HP’s purchase of EDS.

HP has also introduced a “Payback Guarantee” for its MPS customers. Mr Dahlgren explains: ”In conversations with customers, we’re hearing that a lack of visibility means that the big costs associated with printers are not being addressed.“ Under the scheme, any company that does not make the cost savings that HP’s consultants project for them within 12 months will be refunded the shortfall.

Other companies make similar offers. Xerox, for example, guarantees total cost of ownership reductions within year one of deployment. Unlike other MPS providers, Xerox does not force a refresh of the printer fleet, but will take over management of other manufacturer’s printers if the customer requests it, according to Andy Jones, director and general manager of Xerox Global Services.

US-based manufacturer Ingersoll Rand has recently signed a nine-year MPS contract with Xerox to deal with its complex estate of printers that fall into three different categories, according to John Kalka, vice president of deployment in Ingersoll Rand’s Office of the CIO. Some printers are owned by Ingersoll-Rand; some are leased; and some are already under a MPS contract with Xerox.

Under the new Xerox contract, printers in the first and last categories will be replaced only on an as-needed basis, while those that are leased will be decommissioned. ”We needed a strategic partner we could make responsible for both quality and cost in a truly variable cost model based on usage,” says Mr Kalka.

By bringing their printer estates under MPS, a further benefit is that no document will appear in a printer tray until the person requiring it is at the printer and has authorised it. At RSA, for example, staff will swipe their employee badge on the printer’s reader. Other companies use Pin codes to achieve the same thing.

That kind of service is addressing an issue that many businesses continue to overlook, says Graham Long, vice president of Samsung’s European printing operation. Unsecured printing environments, he claims, pose serious risks for European companies that could result in legal action, lost clients and lost revenue – and yet few business are aware of the reputational and financial risks their printing infrastructure poses.

In research recently conducted by the company among 4,500 workers across Europe. More than half of respondents (56 per cent) said that they see confidential company documents, printed by someone else, sitting on the printer at least once a month. One in five claim to see such documents every day.

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