How to reduce costs in your desktop laser printer fleet. Enterprise Output Management October 20, 2008
Posted by Julian Bradder in Uncategorized.Tags: archive, cost per page, document storage, enterprise output management, laser printer, print cost, Report Management, retrieval
add a comment
At least 10% of an organisations budget is spent on printing. And much of this is derived from printing to local work group printers. Some organisations have thousands of them.
They print reports, documents, emails, proposals and many more kinds of documents. For many organisations the challenge is understanding who is using them and how to manage them from a budgetary perspective.
I think that it would be fair to say that for many companies, there just isn’t the need to slavishly print every piece of work out, we don’t need paper to distribute documents any more.
The use of Enterprise Output Management software working in concert with an electronic document archive and retrieval system can help great. The Output Management system can control where output is destined and can assign a print job to a particular user or department. This allows budgetary management processes and means that departments can take responsibility for managing and reducing their own print budgets.
Similarly, an archive and retrieval system will cut down print. System generated reports, large documents can be printed to the archive and retrieval system, thereby massively reducing print cost. User requiring the report can simply log into the archive system and draw down only the pages they need.
These archive / report management systems have advanced search and export facilities, improving productivity.
With page costs running at up to £0.15p per page, now is the time to reduce operational overhead by reducing overall print costs.
Enterprise Output Management technology is typically easy and low risk to implement and will start paying for itself the minute you start using it. The market is littered with vendors offering such technology – some better than others!
What is IDARS? September 24, 2008
Posted by Julian Bradder in Document Archival Retrieval, finance applications, IDARS, report management solution, software solution.Tags: document management, IDARS, paper cost, Report Management, report printing, return on investment, roi
add a comment
IDARS is a definition coined by Gartner Group and used to describe a group of software applications that are designed to make documents available online to users within and outside an organisation.
Originally, IDARS was utilised to make mainframe reports available across an organisation. Companies recognised that huge amounts of money were being spent printing reports. Often, huge reports hundreds and sometimes thousands of pages long were being printed and being printed again. Often this was in order that a worker could view one or a few pages and after this, the report is discarded. Every time reports are run, there is a big load on the software application that produces them. This could slow down the system and cause problems around month end because of the slow speed.
Rather than do this, the document is simpy printed to file, held in a compressed repository and then made available to users with authority to access the reports. By being able to seek out information on screen huge savings in productivity and print were achieved.
By implementing this technology in a UK bank, who were experiencing print costs of £0.12 per page we achieved annual savings of over£5m p.a against a spend of £200k. Impressive results.
The use of IDARS applications has now expanded and many document types are supported within the system. The use of IDARS technology helps to drive down paper usage and improves productivity.
Relatively simple to implement, it is in my view a ‘no-brainer’ for any organisation producing large amounts of paper.
Document Projects. Marketing & Customer Communications Management 