3 Ways Printers are Stealing Your Organizations Soul
January 30th, 2023 by Kevin Box
Those little benign printers in the corner of your office are huge money pits ready to steal your organizational soul at a moment’s notice. OK, I’m sorry my post-holiday, stressed out self, went a little overboard. However, that statement is not that far from the truth, printers are huge money pits - I made up the stealing your soul part.
The big question is, why are printers huge money pits that often fly under the radar from an expense standpoint? The answer is in the question…Why do they fly under the radar? Organizations often take printers for granite and typically view them as a necessary office supply expense, however printers make up a high part of office expenses, so much so that it makes sense to isolate the expenditure and actively pursue better alternatives. In this article, we will look at three primary reasons why printers are hurting your organization.
1. About 50% of Your Organizations Help Desk Calls are Printer Related…Wait, What?
Most organizations need printing to function day-to-day, however their people are printing way too much and when the printer breaks down, the Help Desk is being deluged with calls for all sorts of issues like, “my printer won’t print”, especially if the printer is as old Bob down in the receiving department. A recent study by Gartner estimates that as much as 50% of Help Desk Calls are printer related. This means if printers are going down frequently, then your Help Desk is inundated with printer related calls, which further means your Help Desk personnel are not able to help on other technology issues that are critical to your organization’s mission.
However, it’s not just the high number of Help Desk calls that are stealing our collective souls, but also the time it takes for each Help Desk Specialist to handle all those calls. For example, let’s say that each printer related call takes 15-minutes to navigate and solve and your Help Desk receives 50 such calls a day, this means your Help Desk is spending on average 750 minutes or 12.5 hours a day handing just printer related calls which is equal to one and a half full time employees. Let’s say you pay a Help Desk Specialist $70,000 a year plus benefits. Not only are you stealing my soul, but now my head’s exploding.
2. A Managed Print Services Program Can Reduce Operating Cost By 30%
Let’s face it, most organizations don’t have a cohesive policy in place for managing printers and consequently, don’t truly know what those little soul stealers are costing. The normal cadence is to allow each department to purchase their own printers and toner as needed, which is often through online retail sources. These over-the-counter printers are typically cheaper on the front end with a much higher Total Cost of Ownership over time and are typically manufactured with home use in mind and come with lower yielding toners at a much higher price, driving up the cost per copy for each page printed.
Purchasing Enterprise Level devices instead, which have double and sometimes triple the toner yield, means huge savings per copy printed which will translate into a reduction in operating costs.
Another proven strategy is to pass the cost of toner on to a proven Managed Print Services partner who can provide toner and break fix services at a fraction of the cost. This will also give your organization a single source of costs that is trackable and quantifiable, which will drastically reduce the cost associated with printing while also helping the organization meet its sustainability goals.
3. A Lack of Security on Your Printers Could Be Problem
Not only are printers stealing our souls, but those little money traps are also allowing hackers to steal our data. Organizations are continuously creating confidential, valuable data that’s critical to it running optimally and efficiently in real-time and are probably using multiple security methods—including authentication, encryption, and monitoring—to protect this data on PCs, networks, and servers. But are the printing and imaging environments as secure as the rest of the infrastructure?
The challenging part of managing printers is ensuring the fleet is secure. Printers are in many cases the weakest link on the network and need remediation to close this gateway for hackers to exploit. Managing printer security can be a daunting task for Network Administrators who have limited IT staff levels to run around remediating each device, so the norm is to do nothing and hope existing security layers are enough to do the job. However, this leaves the organization and its critical data and resources vulnerable to being hacked. There is a simple fix however that can help secure these vulnerable devices. Organizations should look to purchase Enterprise Level Printers because these devices are manufactured with security built into the printer. Over-the-counter printers do not have security built into the device.
In conclusion, managing your printer fleet doesn’t have to be a hassle or costly if you implement the right solution to optimize your print assets. Partnering with a leading Managed Print partner can help your organization save time, money, and ultimately help save your printing soul.
If you have any questions concerning this article or would like to have one of Function4’s Print Specialist conduct a Cost Benefit Analysis for your organization, reach out to me directly and I will connect you with a member of our team. I can be reached at kbox@function-4.com.
Posted in: Managed Print Services