Making the Case for MPS

Have you printed something today on the printer sitting in your office, or the network printer down the hall, or perhaps copied a document on that multifunction printer shared by your department? Chances are that you have actually performed this action many times today. In fact, this is happening around the world in businesses at the rate of 1 tn pages a year.

The Internet, PDF documents that can be read on any system, massive increase in electronic storage space, and Electronic Content Management (ECM) systems were supposed to result in a paperless office. However, instead of reducing the amount of paper used by organizations, this is actually increasing document production as paper moved from being an information storage tool to being a convenience item. Instead of printing a document and filing it for later use (how many of those pages do you actually file that you print each day?), we receive an electronic document, print it to read it, throw it away, print it again at some later date when we need it again, throw it away, and repeat this process many times with a single electronic document.

As a result, the promise of the paperless office has eluded corporations, and in fact, may never materialize. The typical company has one imaging device for every two employees. These imaging devices drive an average cost of almost $725 per employee per year. At the same time, these devices produce an average of 890,371 lbs of carbon emissions per year and consume over 52,321 Kilowatt-hours of electricity per year. Supporting and managing these devices takes up over 10% of the typical IT organizations time. Until recently this distributed cost was largely hidden and unmanaged. If your printer ran out of toner, your assistant would simply purchase a replacement from the local office supply store or from an online retailer. These supplies were buried in the annual department operating budget with no visibility to senior management. I have yet to see a corporate P&L that listed imaging and printing as a line item on the expense statement, have you? Read more…