Now, on-demand printing for organizations

MUMBAI: Today, printing double-side, quota printing, print only when required, e-mails, paper-less offices etc, are the popular ways adopted by companies and firms to cut-costs as well as to become eco-friendly.

According to Kumar P. Ranjan, country manager of Lexmark International (India) Pvt Ltd, these methods are mainly focused on lowering the apparent printing cost but beyond that there's lots of hidden costs involved.

“Hidden costs involve total cost of ownership (TCO) that includes cost of papers, toner or inks, printers and power usage. Moreover, wastage of papers and printings still remains uncounted at large,” says Ranjan.

Apart from popular methods, he suggests that enterprises needs to invest smartly in right technology and devices that help to reduce paper usage by 20-25 per cent.

Printing jobs needs to be tracked. The devices for duplex printing, use of access cards, passwords for printing are some of technology-based means to control printing and wastage, he says.

Further, though paperless office concept is growing, practically it doesn't work due to business and strategic needs. “Even Bill Gates in his book, 'Business @ the Speed of Thought' says the paper usage in his office has doubled than the previous year,” he observes.

For banks, insurance companies, telecom and power service providers printing remains integral part of business process, where volumes and volumes of paper are printed regularly in forms of bills, statements, etc, points out Ranjan.

For such high voluminous printing, Lexmark offers managed print services which is simply outsourcing of printing or popularly called as 'on-demand printing.' Lexmark has partnered CMS to provide the services across India.

The company has about 3000 global customers for the managed print services, while in India it has about 50-odd customers mainly from insurance and government sector along with IT and ITeS industry. Ranjan said globally Lexmark earns 2.7 billion dollar annually for managed services.

According to industry estimates, organizations and enterprises spend about 1-3 per cent of the total revenues on printing and peripherals, but Lexmark claims it is around 3-5 percentage.

“While offering the services, we look at customer's current cost involved in printing, volumes of printing and then take-up a challenge to reduce that number,” he adds.

Rajan explains that Lexmark follows the discovery process, involving three parts – device consolidation, business process improvement and job proactive management.

“Device consolidation optimizes the fleet of printing devices and its usage taking into account the performance, where old devices are replaced in phased manner, while business process improvement tries to help companies in ways to either take the process online or print only when required,” he adds.

Job proactive management is a centralized mechanism for monitoring all printing devices and jobs on the system in organization.

Rajan raises a key point that any A4 size multi-functional printer consumes 600 watts energy per hour, while A3 takes 1200-1300 watts, pointing to power bills apart from the environmental issues.