CFO/CTO guide to Changes in the Printer Industry

What is happening, why it’s important and how to take advantage of the changes to reduce costs

Here’s some of what you will find inside:

Savvy buyers are taking advantage of the unusually low prices by leasing equipment without OEM service and supply contracts, then using new types of compatible toner to reduce operating costs further by 25%-35%

Digital document management will produce tremendous savings from workflow efficiencies, but it will not decrease printing costs. On the contrary, printing will increase by at least 30%.

Copying and faxing are obsolete, replaced by email and a new category of equipment, Multi-Functional Peripherals (MFPs), which feature “scan-to-network” and “scan-to-email” technology.

New remote monitoring technology, used by outsourced printer support vendors, allows for on-site response times within hours, rather than days, shifting the burden of “first response” from IT to the outsourced vendor.

New best practices are being promoted by printer manufacturers for reducing IT support costs. But most organizations with a mix of printer brands and models can achieve the same results and reduce costs without buying new equipment.

Printer sales professionals depend on the fact that buyers do not know the key information needed to negotiate printer deals such as page counts, page density and cost per page. Certain vendors will do free print audits and free software is also available to help organizations make more responsible decisions.

Color printing is increasing at a rate of 30% per year, but most organizations do not understand the complexities of purchasing and managing color printers.

IT departments are now deeply involved in business process
strategy as all forms of document output converge onto the
network. The issues of printer fleet management, digital document management, security, data mining, disaster recovery, and data storage are all now interrelated.