Imaging savings are last 'low hanging fruit,' says HP
Imaging savings are last 'low hanging fruit,' says HP
Imaging and printing are still largely ignored when it comes to cost evaluation of IT infrastructures, despite there being clear cost benefits in doing so.
That is according to Hewlett-Packard, who are working with organisations to highlight the opportunity that exists to make major cost savings by implementing a plan to manage their imaging and printing environment.
"Customers are looking at ways to increase their productivity and reduce their operational costs," says Tan Lee Chew, Vice President, Imaging and Printing Group, HP Asia-Pacific. "Imaging and printing is one area that a lot of enterprises overlook. In fact, we have worked with analysts on this in the past and found out that about 90 percent of companies don't think about imaging and printing costs (Source: Gartner Group, "Rightsizing Output Fleets: The Hidden Goldmine," March 2001)."
Such a high figure is surprising, given the fact that companies can make such dramatic savings and relieve themselves of the burden of managing their own imaging and printing infrastructure at the same time, as Tan explains.
"Imaging and printing accounts for up to 15 percent of an organisation's overall operating costs, so when you think about it from that perspective, with an average sized company of 5000 employees spending about US$3.5 million (Source: CAP Ventures, "Decision making Dynamics in the Convergence Domain," February 2002) on imaging and printing, when you look at the efficiencies such companies can achieve by having a very specific output strategy, the value proposition is tremendous for the customer.
"HP started engaging customers to discuss the possibility of having organisations like ourselves managing the whole print environment for them, so if you area user and you don't want to worry about when your equipment needs serviced or how your network is set up, we can take care of all that and reduce the total cost of ownership."
Rebekah O'Flaherty, Vice President and General Manager, HP South Pacific Imaging and printing Group, agrees that the ease in which organisations can save big simply by changing how they approach the issue will surely lead to a change in the mindset of IT managers when it comes to this area.
"This is such a low hanging fruit in terms of potential cost savings and it has been something of a blind spot for organisations, but it represents a great opportunity."
An example of the potential savings to be made, according to Tan, exists within the printing environment.
"As we look at the balance of deployment between colour and mono printing, we realised we are able to work with the customer and reduce operational costs by between 15 and 25 percent just for printing alone."
As to why this seemingly clear opportunity to save is rarely seized upon, Tan says: "If you look at how printing costs are accounted for within an organisation, typically it will be the administrator or secretary that will order the supplies. There is no clear asset management, whereas an IT department will have a helpdesk for everything. It is therefore critical for companies to start thinking about their output strategy."
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