Edu-leaders

Even as the wheels of our education system turn slowly in the direction of an all-digital paperless future, the reality and importance of printing in the day-to-day activities of the administrator and the student’s life cannot be understated. Reports, certificates, marketing material, teaching collateral, memos and circulars, official records — the list is seemingly endless. Without the right printing strategy in place, an institution’s printing investments and running costs can threaten to spiral, not to mention the yet unforeseen (for most) ecological impact. How do you, as heads of institutions, make the right choices that safeguard not only your future investments into the printing domain but regularise and course-correct existing investments? We spoke to leading solution providers to look at the important considerations and choices you have to make when formalising your own efficient and green printing strategy.

Should We Worry?

If we take a moment to draw a parallel with the corporate sector, the results are startling. An InfoTrends study in 2006 found that organisations perceived that they spend an average of three per cent of their annual revenues on printing, copying and fax-related costs, whereas the actual figure for overall document expenditures (including hardware, supplies and ‘people’ costs) averaged six per cent of annual revenues across all industries. Reducing total cost of ownership (TCO) is critical — institutions need to factor not just the initial cost of document management solution but also the associative operational cost over the life of the system. Even more recently, a 2011 survey of Public CIOs and IT professionals from government technology sector showed that 79 per cent of survey participants are currently unable to identify their total printing costs. While it’s true that these results may be specific to a select audience, the trend is key here, and lessons apply equally to the education sector as any other.

In fact, as Nitin Hiranandani, Director, LaserJet Enterprise Solutions, Imaging and Printing Group, HP India, points out, many of the largest cost components of document output are often hidden and grow over time. These include costs associated with device proliferation, device underutilisation, multiple disparate print architectures (which do not interact or mesh well with each other), multiple print drivers and of course, energy drain. Hiranandani recommends each institution conduct a careful analysis with these factors in mind, since management of these components can produce dramatic savings in imaging and printing costs for institutions of all sizes.

How to Go about It

It’s clear that printing costs are real, and while it’s easy to call in the experts like folks from HP, Canon or Samsung to rethink your printing strategy, due diligence and internal analysis of your demands from the printing infrastructure is critical before the first consultant comes on board. Best practices suggest that device consolidation should be considered whenever an organisation’s user-to-device ratios fall below 10:1, towards avoiding excessive expenditures associated with equipment redundancy, such as IT support (networking, help desk), consumables (acquisition, storage) and real estate (footprint). A direct effect of device proliferation is tremendous underutilisation. For example many heavy-duty copiers available in the market typically are capable of producing 15,000 to 45,000 pages per month, but data (collected by HP) suggested that the average copier in the US actually produces fewer than 8,000 pages per month! Consider this — is your institute catering for much more copying and printing capacity than you actually need? Adequate thought also needs to be given to future-proofing your investment, and large vendors today offer printers that have update capabilities for new features that will be available in the future. For example, HP FutureSmart equipped enterprise devices are designed to evolve with the technologies of the future, which is, in a sense, an assurance for your institute that your devices would not become obsolete with the next technology wave, and will instead adapt and evolve.

MFDs vs Desktop Printers?

Multifunction devices (MFDs), as the name suggests, combine features of two or more devices, typically a scanner and a printer, possibly even a fax machine, into a single device. Not only do they make optimal utilisation of space, but also are ideal for departments or smaller locations where the volume of imaging tasks (scanning/copying) is low, and can replace the proliferation of several printers on individual’s desktops. Quite naturally, you should expect resistance from the users — many will complain that they will have to walk and collect documents, that security levels would not be as good, etc. Many of these concerns can be addressed via technology and coaching correct printing habits by showing the direct linkage in cost control and profits, especially in senior members of the staff and administration. Bear in mind, it is still very rare to find printing implementations that are completely on MFDs alone, and clever application of technology can help mitigate the perpage costs of desktop printers in situations where an MFD is not acceptable.

Are We Secure?

Centralising your print infrastructure naturally brings up security concerns — if left unmanaged, these can compromise security and confidentiality of the print documents. If any of the following stacks of unclaimed print jobs, sensitive documents left unattended, print jobs routed to an inappropriate device or a device in another location — sound familiar to you, you should strongly consider a vendor that factors in elements of a secure printing approach. For example, vendors offer a feature like secure pull printing that allows users to dynamically print to the network and ‘pull’ jobs to any enabled device. What it achieves is a virtual elimination of unclaimed documents while simultaneously reduces IT administrative burdens. Combined with features like authentication at the print terminal via a swipe card or a user passcode, you can ensure that nothing is printed (or wasted) until the owner authenticates the job on the printer.

Managed Print Services (associated diagram at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Target_diagram.png ) Another key consideration can be whether your institute would like to ‘outsource’ the printing capabilities to the vendor via what vendors refer to as their Managed Print Services(MPS). Whether you speak to a Canon or an HP or a Samsung, each of them can offer an MPS strategy that consolidates on-site printers, MFPs, copiers and fax fleet management with a variety of flexible options, from basic cost-per-page contracts to comprehensive service engagements. As a decision-maker, you get complete visibility on device usage across your campus via convenient metrics based dashboards, so you can accurately monitor, measure and control excesses at the point of origin. In addition, institutions get the added benefits of a consolidated billing statement, proactive fleet maintenance and automatic software upgrades and environment optimisation throughout the contract period. Some vendors even conduct period assessments to make recommendations about changes you can effect in the print infrastructure to meet growing demands like, for instance, if you’re regularly exceeding the initial estimates of print pages. Depending on your implementation scale, the savings in TCO through an MPS solution range from anywhere between 10 to 30 per cent.

User Sensitisation Careless or thoughtless printing places heavy budgetary burden on educational institutions, and there are many ways that administrators and IT staff can make users sensitive to the costs. Apart from initiatives like pull printing and factoring in print usage in measuring department efficiency (via MPS solutions), technology can help define rules for each user. For example, HP’s Access Control Intelligent Print Management (IPM) solution allows institutes to capture users’ print behaviour and provide them with notifications regarding their usage, or place page limits per user — small initiatives that make users think before they print. In the background, user access can be controlled and directed to specific printers, so that marketing departments have access to rich colour

prints for collateral, while others have access to the high-volume capabilities and speed they need. Vendor managed solutions also let you specify duplex or two-sided printing in draft mode as the default mode for printing, leading to savings on paper and consumables costs.

Going Green

Our responsibility to the environment and to the world we leave to our children is non-negotiable, and one of the key ways of going green for your institute is via the implementation of a green printing strategy. What’s more, a green printing strategy is not a financial burden — far from it, in fact as you will realise during roll-out. You can keep the following steps in mind when planning to go green with the printer infrastructure.

• Reduce Paper Usage: set your printers to print two-sided by default, cutting your paper consumption by as high as 50 per cent.

• Recycle wasted paper, and if possible, purchase paper from vendors which use sustainable materials in the paper they sell.

• Buy printers and MFDs with intelligent power saving modes or those that come with the Energy Star certification. EnergyStar equipment is sometimes made from renewable resources and also uses less energy than your conventional equipment.

• Ask your vendor for a recycling programme for consumables. Samsung, for example, runs a programme in select countries called STAR (Samsung Takeback and Recycling). Essentially a free service, Samsung collects empty print cartridges, safely recycles them, converting them into useful materials and thereby ensuring they are not incinerated or sent to landfills.

• Eschew printing in favour of online marketing, wherever possible.

  Further Reading

1. Liverpool John Moores University’s Print Strategy - http://bit.ly/sgg6dM

2. Los Angeles Trade-Technical College’s Print Strategy - http://bit.ly/sJ04eU

3. Case Studies from the Education Sector (HP) - http://bit.ly/tIJLoW and Eco

Solutions - http://bit.ly/tO8vzd