Get The Fine Print

After years of neglect, CIOs are now faced with the complexities

of managing high printing costs

The CIO

knows that life's getting tougher when he's called into his CFO's office

and asked questions like: How much do we spend on managing printers? Why are we

spending so much on toners? And, at the end of the meeting he's told to evolve

a comprehensive output device management plan to cut down on print expenditure.

Well, it is not an

isolated incident. Enterprises are struggling to manage print related costs,

which are escalating, while at the same time getting pressurized by the top

management to cut down on capital expenditure on printers. This also signifies

the changing roles of IT heads. For long they have been concentrating on large

IT deployments and have totally ignored the fact that more the information gets

digitized, the need for output on paper will also rise exponentially. This is

the reason why after so many years of neglect, the concept of print management

is suddenly hogging the limelight.

The Pain Areas



It seems the age-old adage 'what is not measured and monitored cannot be

managed' holds true when it comes to enterprise print management. Part of the

ambiguity is due to the involvement of different stakeholders in acquiring and

managing printers. For instance, the acquiring part comes under the CIO, while

buying consumables and paper comes under the administration department. But, at

the end of the year when audit is done, printing costs, as a whole, are listed

as part of the Capex related to IT. This is the root cause of the problem that

CIOs are now coming to grips with.

The next major pain

area is the heterogeneous technologies the enterprise have acquired over the

years. A typical large enterprise would be having inkjets, lasers, MFDs, and

DMPs. Every technology has its unique consumable costs, which leads to

indiscriminate consumption. It is now an accepted fact that the printer

acquisition cost is just 5% and the rest are consumables. This indiscriminate

consumption happens because of inappropriate placing the printers, and their

unmonitored usage. There are cases of too many standalone print devices, and

with no clear-cut policy, employees print almost anything. This leads to huge

paper expenditure. Says GS Ravikumar, CIO, GATI, “We were having a slew of

print devices and managing them became a big problem. The issues we faced were

many: some departments used excessive toner, slow machine speeds, and escalating

AMC expenses with almost no control on consumable costs.”

Another pain area is

that over the years organizations have developed an inventory of outdated and

aged print devices. This was mainly due to fast technology obsolescence cycles

that have put them in a twin dilemma. One, running costs of old printers are

high. Two, when they go for buying new printers, the management often refuses as

they are seen just as cost centers. Hence, a CIO needs to justify a lot to the

management to make them realize that new printers can cut costs and increase

productivity.

Managing Printers



The selection of the right technology that brings in maximum RoI is indeed a

daunting task. The CIOs have to start with an audit of the existing print

devices and identify, which are the ones that are costing them more in terms of

consumable and maintenance. The next step would be to identify the load patterns

on any given day; to note 'who prints what' and whether the printed output

can be justified by the employee. Based on these three steps the CIO has to

evolve an output device management plan and mesh it with overall IT strategy.

Once when the print plan is in place, the CIO needs to choose the right vendors

who can offer solutions that are in sync with the enterprises' business

objectives. A through due diligence and exploring the solutions offered by

different vendors will help in selection of the best solutions. Quips Samir

Shah, country category manager-shared printing and connectivity, HP India,

“The realization about the complexities involved in printing is gaining

momentum by the day. In addition to right selection of technologies, there is

also lots of change management issues involved, for instance any rationalization

of the print environment would be faced by stiff resistance, hence lots of user

education is needed”. Agrees Arun Gupta, senior director, Business Technology,

Pfizer, “The biggest issue we face is to keep the number of printers under

check as there was substantial resistance when we eliminated personal printers

across the organization. Every user has a justification and the business head is

willing to approve the deployment of an additional printer due to the low

initial investment.”

	color:black;mso-font-width:90%;mso-ansi-language:EN-US;mso-fareast-language: EN-US;mso-bidi-language:AR-SA">“Measuring RoI on IT assets is a daunting task, printer being the item with the highest recurring cost. Given that, outsourcing print offers a remedy to a lot of print management issues” - color:black;mso-font-width:90%;mso-ansi-language:EN-US;mso-fareast-language: EN-US;mso-bidi-language:AR-SA">Thomas S Anand, WeP Peripherals
	color:black;mso-font-width:90%;mso-ansi-language:EN-US;mso-fareast-language: EN-US;mso-bidi-language:AR-SA">“Measuring, monitoring, and managing the expenses on printing and document output is complex and challenging. The expenditure and costs often sit in different departments, functions, and areas. Consolidating them into one fold can be difficult and time consuming” - color:black;mso-font-width:90%;mso-ansi-language:EN-US;mso-fareast-language: EN-US;mso-bidi-language:AR-SA">LV Sastry, Xerox Global Services
	color:black;mso-font-width:90%;mso-ansi-language:EN-US;mso-fareast-language: EN-US;mso-bidi-language:AR-SA">“Device consolidation is an important element in establishing an effective output device management. Enterprises can save a lot by streamlining document workflow and shortening cycle times” - color:black;mso-font-width:90%;mso-ansi-language:EN-US;mso-fareast-language: EN-US;mso-bidi-language:AR-SA">PG Kamath, Lexmark
	color:black;mso-font-width:90%;mso-ansi-language:EN-US;mso-fareast-language: EN-US;mso-bidi-language:AR-SA">“The biggest issue we face is to keep the number of printers under check. There was substantial resistance when we eliminated personal printers across the organization” - color:black;mso-font-width:90%;mso-ansi-language:EN-US;mso-fareast-language: EN-US;mso-bidi-language:AR-SA">Arun Gupta, senior director, Business Technology, Pfizer

Let us look at another

enterprise, SRL Ranbaxy and how it is managing its print infrastructure. The

company uses different kinds of analytical testing equipments. Printers are

attached  with all equipments to

print the raw data. Archiving this document is a regulatory requirement even

though most of the instruments are interfaced with ERP and the relevant data

gets captured into the ERP. So apart from managing and making sure of the

availability of network printers, monitoring and assuring the availability of

other printers which is critical to the operations is very challenging for the

IT infrastructure team. This worsened when the testing equipment supplier (most

of them are international) provided the printer as per their choice and some of

the brand does not have proper support based in India.

Says G Radhakrishna

Pillai, head-IT, SRL Ranbaxy, “We have tried to consolidate the printers on

each floor for cluster of users by providing high speed printers. But security

of the printed document is the biggest concern area since, the printers are

located in one common area, the user prints the document and they forget to pick

the printout, it lies in the printer, thereby giving unwanted access to

others.” While enterprises have to educate users on security, some of the

vendors are also providing technologies aimed at secured printing. Says Som

Gangopadhyay, head-office systems and solutions, Canon India, “The CIO has to

use software solutions for print security management and has to check with

vendors about the kind of cache memory the printers have and how quickly they

can be removed. For instance, the data stored in the printers caches has to be

immediately deleted once the print job is done ”

As companies expand

globally, so does their imaging and print requirements. With this scenario in

the offing, how can CIOs provide a printing infrastructure that is scalable and

supports the growth? Says LV Sastry, associate director, Xerox Global Services,

“The answer to this is two fold-while on one hand optimizing and effective

management of current infrastructure is important, CIOs should also look at new

technologies to cater to this growing requirement. The prime factor is the total

cost of ownership and RoI.”

CIOs have to look at new technologies to cater to  growing printing requirements	"The realization that there are complexities involved in printing is gaining momentum. In addition to right selection of technologies, there is also lots of change management issues involved" -Samir Shah, country category manager-shared printing and connectivity, HP India
	"There are cases of too many standalone print devices, and with no clear-cut policy, employees print almost anything. This leads to huge paper expenditure" -GS Ravikumar, CIO, GATI

All these years'

printers by and large have been managed in-house. But in the last two years, a

concept that is gaining ground is outsourcing print. Vendors provide two

models-onsite and offsite.  Quips

Sastry, “ The outsourcing strategy for CIOs should be to examine critical

document processes including their output device management.

The vendors can indeed help such customers in lowering their costs,

bring-in efficiency and reduce 'device anarchy'. We provide equipment,

manpower, software, and other services onsite and without any initial

investment. Customers can pay us at the end of each month based on usage on

pay-per-use basis.” Outsourcing surely is a value proposition wherever the

volume of printed output is huge. However, certain areas of print cannot be

outsourced such as confidential information. For instance, a pharma company has

lots of R&D data that ultimately gets printed, those have to be managed

in-house. The point here in the enterprise print management strategy the CIO

evolves-he needs to strike a balanced approach that enables the judicious mix

of technologies and concepts that leads to optimal utilization of the

expenditure going towards printers.

Shrikanth

G in Chennai  



shrikanthg@cybermedia.co.in