British business is bringing print costs under control
Published October 17, 2007 at 3:21 pm · Filed under Printer / Copier
British business has been more successful at controlling print costs than any other European nation according to a new report by Infotec (formerly Danka Europe).
The Ricoh subsidiary has calculated that in 2006 European businesses wasted 9.1 billion euros through inefficient printing practices, up from 8.4 billion euros in 2004.
The level of waste in every European country was higher than in 2004, by an average of 8%, except in Britain where costs fell by 4%, from 1,859 million to 1,780 million euros.
The report identifies a number of factors that have contributed to the rise in unnecessary print costs. These include:
* growth in email and instant messaging, which Infotec suggests can increase print volumes by up to 40% in a typical organisation;
* the use of devices with small screens (e.g. PDAs and Blackberries) to access email attachments, which must then be printed (often in colour) for reading and review;
* higher capacity solid state USB storage devices that make it easy for users to copy and print large multi-page colour documents; and
* sophisticated scanning and indexing on MFPs, which enables people to find and print documents that would otherwise be buried in paper filing cabinets.
The report’s authors note that uncontrolled printing costs have risen despite the widespread availability of print auditing and workflow software designed to eradicate wasteful printing practices and ‘rightsize’ document output operations, for example by replacing expensive desktop devices with departmental MFPs.
They argue that Britain may be the only European region to have reduced DocuWaste because many of these applications were originally developed in the US and have, for cultural and linguistic reasons, been more easily and quickly deployed in the UK than in continental Europe.
Another reason is that as Europe’s financial centre London is full of organisations that want to control print output for compliance and CSR (mainly environmental) reasons. On this basis, they expect Germany to be the next country to reduce its DocuWaste, followed by France.
Infotec estimates that 20-25% of organisations globally have a document output management strategy in place and the software tools needed to identify and allocate print costs by individual or department.
for more info please visit http://www.infotec.com/
