How Managed Print Services Uncover Hidden Costs of Office Printers

Take this example. A hospital or a retail network has 150 devices in their print environment, eachaveraging 3,000 pages a month and one new cartridge every two months. Assume the cartridges are $80 each. A business in this situation buys 900 toners per year. Add to that the costs for extra parts and service calls.

At this granular level, it’s not such a bad scenario for a business with one printer at roughly $500 per year for supplies. Why commit to a full managed print service contract if device cost is so minimal per year? Most of the businesses we work with have far more than one device to deal with in their print infrastructure. Then it’s a whole new ball game when it comes to the real print costs of office printers.

Office Printer Soft Costs You May Not Have Considered

Soft print costs can be tricky because they’re not obvious. You may have even missed them in your printer management strategy. Let’s look at how — other than just the toner — support costs like maintenance, invoicing, toner storage, and labor add to the hard costs of just the toner cartridges.

Soft Costs of Business Printing

• Cost of Support
• Cost of Invoicing
• Cost of Printer-related storage
• Cost of Service Labor

Cost of Support

Printers have become one of the most ticketed items for IT help desks. If your IT team is always swamped, that could be why. Have you considered adding staff to offset printer service requests and workload? For companies with this problem, the cost of support wouldn’t be a negative at all, but an opportunity to free up your own team for other IT priorities. If printer support is already a soft cost draining your own business, better to define and manage it.

A huge benefit of a trusted MPS provider is the best partners come with 24/7/365 help desk support. What this means for you is every user who can’t print and would normally call your IT department for their printing needs, will instead deal with a trusted MPS provider that only fixes business printers.

Cost of Invoicing

Someone in a multi-printer environment must generate and reconcile POs to ensure toners were purchased in the correct amounts and for appropriate usage. Otherwise, consumables expenses can be a tremendous waste if not managed well. We’ve seen companies keep two toners on the shelf for each device. Then they swap out the fleet of 1,000 printers. If you take an $80-per-cartridge cost and multiply it by 300 (two toners per printer in this example), this one print management mistake alone hits you for $24,000. This practice is also a productivity drain.

One of the ways we help customers overcome these costly mistakes and see cost reduction is Just-In-Time (JIT) ordering. This means your teams receive toner replacements when they’re needed, not before, leaving a wasted stockpile in your supply room.

Total Cost of Printer-Related Storage

In bigger office sites or markets, a storage closet filled with toners isn’t at all uncommon, and unfortunately, this runs up two types of costs. The cost of the toner, as just discussed, but also the cost of the space to store these toners.

If you have a room taken up with toners and that space could be used for other necessary business items, then this is a potential waste of resources. We’ve seen rooms in Manhattan offices filled with toner, taking up space that otherwise could be used or rented out for thousands of dollars per month.

Cost of Printer Service Labor

Do you want your team to be printer technicians? Do they want to be printer technicians? In some companies, the onsite staff acts as the first line of defense for printer troubleshooting. This makes sense if you’re an IT company. What if you have a team of nurses and doctors? Their skill is healing people, not technology.

With the right tools, predictive service calls ensure printers across a site won’t go down at all. For example, when a maintenance kit has 10% remaining, why not send another one before the print device is completely down? This makes printer service more fluid, and your onsite staff doesn’t need to worry about what gets ordered, because the problem is handled before it even happens.

Managed print normally isn’t appropriate for the three- to four-person office with one printer. If a business has just one or two office printers, this method of support is probably overkill. In some situations, it’s simply easier and better to deal with things as they come up, since they’re relatively rare events.

Enterprise companies benefit the most from managed print services. Managed Print Services help businesses control the costs of maintaining their print environment across all aspects:

• Labor
• Supplies
• Invoicing
• Storage
• Utilization

Worried About the Hidden Costs in Your Business Printers?

Do you recognize any of the hidden costs we’ve covered in this article?

If Managed Print Services company has potential for your company, give us a call or reach out through our Contact Us page. The team is always happy to discuss your processes, your hidden costs and how we can help get a handle on your print environment. We support multiple brands across the entire USA including nationwide printer repair.