A licence to print money?

There are benefits to managing print requirements, writes Paul Bray in the second of our five-part series

Farewell to files: Print management offerings offer firms financial and environmental benefits.

The paperless office was exposed long ago as one of the great myths of the computer age, yet even today few user organisations stop to count the mounting cost of printing.

Ken Weilerstein, analyst at Gartner, says: “Most organisations do not manage office print and copy carefully enough. Many report they have far too much equipment and only a few know what their needs really are or how they could be better met.

“Paradoxically, spending is likely to increase in and after 2007 as price inducements entice users to print more colour pages. Organisations that fail to take control now may see their costs climb.”

Research by YouGov on behalf of Fujitsu Siemens has found that the average British office worker prints 22 pages a day - a figure that equals 120 billion sheets a year in the UK as a whole, equivalent to a stack of paper more than 8,000 miles high.

With this in mind it is no surprise that print management solutions are a booming business.

Louella Fernandes, principal analyst at Quocirca, says: “Organisations are finally starting to recognise the financial and environmental benefits of rightsizing the printer and imaging fleet through print management, which leads to reduced costs and improved productivity.”

Tracey Rawling Church, marketing director of Kyocera, a vendor of printers and multi-functional devices (MFDs), says the aim of any print management solution is to collate information. “What is being printed, by whom, on how many devices, how often and how much is it costing? Print management solutions make this key data accessible in a format that can be easily manipulated and interpreted so that the printer and the MFD fleet can be deployed with optimum efficiency,” she explains.

Organisations can build up user profiles and track usage of paper and consumables, for example. The analysis is made available as tables, charts and graphs and in a range of data formats from PDF and HTML to CSV and XML. This enables companies to build up a clear picture of how their printer resources are being used - often for the first time.

They also get a clear picture of the printers themselves. “Print management tools can discover all network-connected printing devices and determine how many documents are being printed on each device, meaning that device use can be monitored,” says Fernandes.

“For example, this may mean replacing outdated single-function desktop devices with MFDs.”

Rawling Church says: “The ability of print management to identify what devices they have can come as a shock to some companies, as piecemeal additions to the network are suddenly revealed at a stroke.”

Armed with this information, the organisation can set about reducing or optimising print volumes to bring down costs. The cost of printing can be allocated to particular cost centres - departments, teams, even individual users - so everyone can be made aware of and directly accountable for what they print.

This can be extended to individual clients and projects, enabling the organisation to charge the cost of printing directly to its customers, recouping some of the costs or even creating an additional revenue stream. Universities find it a handy way of charging students for printing, for example.

“Accountability is a wonderful thing,” says Rawling Church. “Being able to show a department exactly what print volume they are generating and the associated cost is a major step towards reducing unnecessary printing. It encourages departments to develop their own responsible printing policies and review these regularly to assess progress.”

If this does not do the trick, she adds, more proactive measures can be implemented, such as defaulting to draft mode and double-sided printing, and limiting the amount that an individual can print or the use of fancy bindings.

“You can also limit the times at which individuals can print, which goes a long way to preventing unauthorised printing of holiday snaps outside office hours,” Rawling Church adds.

Adam Poole, head of channel marketing at vendor Canon Business Solutions, says that developments in management software have enabled MFD interface customisation for the individual user. “This ensures that they are only presented with functions and applications that are required for their specific role, reducing complexity and the need for new device training,” he says.

As noted by Gartner, the costs of colour printing are escalating and print management can help keep these in check.

Alan McLeish, product marketing manager at vendor Oki Printing Solutions, says: “Companies are increasingly using print management either to prevent users from printing in colour altogether or to restrict the software packages they can use for colour printing.

“This need is likely to be an increasingly important driver of new technology in the future.”

Money can also be saved by intelligent routing, says Steve Hewson, a spokesman for vendor Toshiba Tec. “Print management software recognises the volume of a print job and directs it to machines that are available and best suited for the job, to those that are cheaper for high volume printing, for example,” he says.

Similar algorithms can be applied to achieve best-cost colour printing, and to optimise the use of all printers so that fewer machines stand idle and the overall number of devices can be pegged or reduced.

Print management can aid both users and IT support professionals through proactive monitoring and remote configuration.

Steve Pearce, marketing product manager for vendor Samsung, says: “Remote monitoring tools can inform the IT department of any potential issues before they occur, enabling them to manage their time better. Support staff can receive emails telling them when paper is running low, so they can remedy the problem before it affects users.”

The cost savings achieved through better accountability, proactive maintenance and more efficient use of print resources can be considerable. “Organisations that take the right steps to actively manage their office printing and copying can save 10 to 30 per cent of their spending,” says Weilerstein.

Vendors agree. The savings vary, says Mark Anderson, office product business manager for vendor Xerox, but “large organisations could save in the region of €250 (£174) per office-based employee per year, or 20 to 30 per cent of the overall imaging and printing costs.”

Although it may curtail their ability to print what they like when they like, print management does have some advantages for end users.

“One of the most exciting potential developments is follow-me printing, which allows individuals who find their chosen printer is busy to simply divert their job to another printer using a swipe card or user code,” says McLeish.

Similarly, jobs may be routed to another device if the selected one is offline or out of order.

Print management software is widely available, with most major printer and MFD vendors offering free basic software and paid-for premium products - either their own, or from third parties such as Equitrac, PrintAudit and Ringdale.

Firms with multi-vendor print platforms should ensure that their management software can cope with all the vendors’ kit, says Anderson.

Functionally, most print management solutions are pretty similar, according to Poole, although there are differences in the levels of reporting and accuracy available, and in services such as consultancy.

Any user organisation, public or private sector, is a potential customer for print management, and with market penetration still relatively low the opportunities are good.

Large corporations obviously have more costs to save than small firms, and institutions such as schools and colleges like the concept because it enables them to control or charge for printing by students; similarly, professional firms like the idea of being able to charge printing costs direct to clients.

Although cost control tends to be the primary driver for introducing print management, the environmental benefits of reducing paper, ink and electricity usage are a useful side-effect, especially for schools, or companies keen to improve their green credentials.

Any printer reseller with an interest in adding value should consider print management, says Rawling Church, because it “offers the opportunity to develop a consultative relationship with customers while saving them money.”

It can also sway the customer’s decision to buy a particular piece of hardware.

The key advantage for resellers is the ability to sell the customer a total solution bundle rather than just a piece of kit, says Neil O’Donoghue, solutions product manager at vendor Ricoh.

“If a reseller can sell an output device and print management software, the customer will be less likely to buy from rivals because it could break the total solution sale,” he says.

“Print management software will drive the sale of the printer or MFD, as well as providing a differentiator for manufacturer and reseller. Connectivity and integration capabilities will be the new deciding factor over speeds and feeds of the device, meaning that sales will become less price sensitive.”

A licence to print money?

There are benefits to managing print requirements, writes Paul Bray in the second of our five-part series

A successful print management sale could set up a chain reaction that ultimately extends to sales of document management and business process automation solutions.

“Resellers need to look at the wider picture,” says Fernandes. “Print management offers printer resellers the opportunity to help organisations rightsize their environments and replace workgroup/
single-function devices with MFDs, enabling them to make inroads into the copier space dominated by
high-end MFDs. As MFDs become a document capture solution that can be integrated with business processes, this can offer resellers the potential to become more involved in document solutions sales as well as support and maintenance.”

A number of recurring revenue streams may be generated, including consultancy, software maintenance, servicing and supplies of consumables. Pay-per-click solutions are becoming popular and print management can help to identify where a pay-per-click solution may be viable, says Anderson.
Fernandes adds that outsourcing print management to resellers is becoming an attractive proposition for many user organisations.

Implementing print management can be expensive and resellers will have to prepare their customers for this.

Mcleish says: “Typically users will need to set up a server and then route all printing jobs through that central point. The server will then manage the flow of printing jobs to the outlying devices. If the firm wants to implement follow-me printing it will typically have to incur additional hardware costs because of the need to install a separate device close to each individual printer.”

It is also essential to get buy-in from senior managers and users, since new policies and working
practices may be necessary to realise the full benefits.

“It’s naive to think that simply installing a print management system on the network will magically reduce overheads,” says Rawling Church. “User education is vital - without it there will be resistance to adopting new ways of printing. This represents an opportunity for resellers to add value and deliver training programmes in conjunction with the vendor that will ensure that customers really see the benefits.”

Users will soon appreciate the convenience of follow-me printing, greater availability and not having to wade through an output tray full of other people’s printouts, says O’Donoghue. And the green argument can be a powerful one. “Canon worked with a council to display pallets of paper in its reception and equated the pallets to trees, which really captured the staff’s imagination,” says Poole.

Print management can be lucrative, but it requires commitment from the reseller, says McLeish. “Margins can be higher, but the sales cycle tends to be longer. The reseller will also need to commit a significant amount of time to auditing and convincing the customer of the business need, and to carrying out a proof of concept to demonstrate how the solution would work in practice. Specialist pre-sales and post-sales support is necessary to carry out an audit and implement the solutions.”

Specialist skills in network infrastructure and report writing may be required, along with more general consultancy, support and training skills. Copier and office automation VARs often have the edge over IT resellers, but any VAR should be able to acquire the necessary skills with their vendor’s support.

“Smart resellers know that managed printing is where the recurring revenue is and they will go with the manufacturer that makes it easiest for them to get into it,” says Philip Grote, senior analyst for business printing at Current Analysis West. “Very few resellers can switch overnight from selling a box to being a full-blown managed service provider , so manufacturers need to provide baby-step components that allow a reseller to slowly mature from a box-pusher t o a service provider. “Where manufacturers and resellers most often fail is in trying to do too much, too fast.”

Wise VARs will therefore look for a vendor that offers reasonably priced training and accreditation plus a full range of support services. With these in place, they should be able to turn print management into a lucrative part of their service offering.

What is print management?

Neil O’Donoghue, solutions product manager at Ricoh, outlines 10 key features of print management systems:

*Route output directly to the most efficient device for the job.

*Accurately allocate output costs to user, department or project codes.

*Eliminate unauthorised printing and copying and protect document confidentiality with secure document release.

*Follow-me printing, where devices can be grouped and the document printed at the most convenient printer.

*Manage colour costs by enforcing quotas on colour output.

*Increase device efficiency for the best return on investment.

*Reduce IT support requirements via centralised printing.

*Monitor devices and redirect a print job should a device be unavailable.

*Obtain insight into usage patterns.

*Automatically capture meter readings.

Print management in emerging markets

Canon Business Solutions has identified three key emerging markets for print management, as Adam Poole, head of channel marketing, explains:

*General office customers want to control user access to output devices, identify where user training is required and discover how to maximise benefit from their assets while reducing costs and improving productivity. Small organisations want basic information gathering to understand costs and track and manage expenditure. Medium-sized organisations want cost information and o control access to devices for certain print jobs. Corporates want an auditing tool that provides information, controls access, maximises benefit from devices and delivers efficiency gains.

*Academic customers use print management to control access to devices and, in the case of higher and further education, to create revenue streams by charging students for print jobs.

*Professional customers also use print management to monitor jobs to allow them to charge clients for work and deliver revenue streams. This market splits into professional services, where print management is used to charge clients for projects, and print-for-pay, where it controls client access to devices and is used to charge-back on client jobs.

Summary

*Most organisations are woefully ignorant about print costs and volumes, and even how many printing devices they have.

*Print management enables them to regain control of printing by identifying all printing devices on the network, measuring usage and remotely monitoring device status.

*Clear cost accounting enables users to be made aware of the financial and environmental cost of what they print and charge for it if appropriate.

*Print jobs can be routed to the most economical and convenient device, and use of expensive devices such as colour or small-volume printers can be restricted.

*Print management is a classic solution sale that any print reseller can tackle with appropriate training and support. It can assist sales of print hardware and recurring items and may lead to sales of document management and business process automation solutions.