MPS is certainly creating a tremendous market opportunity for vendors, but it’s important for clients to understand that success in MPS comes from effective execution, not up-front promises.

Are you benefiting from your current investments? Consider what went into the decision making process for your company’s current output environment, including the current fleet of multi-vendor copiers, printers and other hardware. Is it still delivering what you need? Could it do more like scanning and imaging for easy access?

Can your technology keep up? As a business changes and evolves, so must its output solution. If the current technology is unable to keep up with the demand from additional employees and increased usage, it is merely a drain on your financial and human resources. Or, if your current strategy does not provide flexibility as the total employee population fluctuates up or down, you have an opportunity for improvement. Click here to learn more

As part of these efforts, HP is:

• Working to reduce waste in its manufacturing, distribution and product development, enabling responsible purchase, use and recycling of products by customers.
• Offering ways to help customers reduce waste in their printing uses.
• Introducing ways to reduce waste through product packaging.
• Achieving industry-leading milestones in recycling and the use of recycled plastic.

Enabling reduction of waste and energy, reusing reclaimed materials and designing for ease in recyclability are among the key principles of HP’s environmental commitment.

To date, HP has produced more than 1 billion ink cartridges manufactured with recycled plastic. Through this and other efforts, HP has pledged to use a total of 100 million pounds of recycled plastic in printing products by 2011 (cumulatively, since 2007). Read more…

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…