£360m could be saved in the UK every year by moving expensive outsourced printing in‐house, revealed a survey recently.
The Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) found that additional savings could be made, with between £500m and £1.76m potentially coming from more efficient management of existing in‐house printing tasks.
Small-to-medium sized enterprises (SMEs) often benefit most from high-quality in-house printing solutions due to their strong focus on efficient business operations. Print vendors can support this focus by delivering a powerful combination of free in-the-box software utilities and cost-effective A4 and A3 printing.
By giving SMEs the flexibility to bring their printing in-house, this approach enables them to drive efficiencies by eliminating wastage. Companies invariably print more than they need when they outsource jobs, usually to get the most cost-effective deal available. The excess, typically 20% of the total print job, is often wasted.
Today, it is increasingly important from both a cost-saving and a green IT perspective to improve the ‘utilisation ratio’ when printing. Producing documents and brochures on-demand, using a combination of in-house printers and in-the-box software to customise them to the organisation’s precise needs, is a surefire way of cutting costs, improving productivity and reducing waste.
Ideally, businesses should look for printers that give them truly professional results without incurring the expense of outsourcing the work to a litho print house
It is also critical that the whole organisation adopts a culture of smarter printing. How many times do you read on the bottom of emails, “please don’t print this email unless you absolutely need to”. This simple measure - locally enforced - is the first step to making positive attempts to reduce the impact on the environment.
However, to make a lasting difference, the achievement of this objective should be part of an organisation-wide drive for printing that is more efficient and results in a corresponding reduction in waste.
Much of this comes down to a process of education. Users can be trained to cut paper wastage further by always using print preview, for example, or by using a web print utility to ensure each web page fits on one side of paper. In addition, many SMEs are unaware that there are additional measures they can take to reduce waste. Simply by using double-sided printing, for example, they can at a stroke cut paper use by up to 50%.
Creativity and flexibility
It is clear that the benefits SMEs can achieve through high-quality in-house printing solutions go far beyond straightforward reductions in wastage. In line with OKI’s unique ‘Look What You Can Do Messaging' tagline, businesses can also support the drive for efficiency referenced in the CEBR report by becoming more creative in developing corporate materials.
Business cards, letterheads, compliment slips and invoices can be given a consistent ‘look and feel’, reinforcing the company brand, while sales and marketing collateral can be adapted and enhanced for greater impact. Vendors can deliver additional functionality by supplying, and allowing users to print on, different types of paper, including specialist pre-creased, waterproof and tearproof ranges.
In this context, flexibility is key but it also needs to be allied to high-performance levels. Effective in-house printing is all about presentation quality. Ideally, businesses should look for printers that give them truly professional results without incurring the expense of outsourcing the work to a litho print house.
SMEs need to ensure that their chosen printers can both create high-impact marketing materials and output them rapidly to meet tight deadlines. Time-to-first-print, print speed and processor performance metrics are all key in keeping wait times low. Paper tray and consumables capacities also impact on productivity as higher capacities reduce user interventions and overall downtime.
As they look to the future, it is important that SMEs not only capitalise on the opportunities that smarter printing provides but also remain receptive to new ideas and approaches - new ways of driving efficiencies from smarter printing practices. Today, we are also seeing growing customer interest in total managed print services as a means of purchasing printers, supplies, maintenance and support in one all-inclusive contract, enabling SMEs to potentially reduce both capital investment and ongoing printing costs.
Reaping rewards
Printing is a core function of any SME office today. Yet many businesses fail to realise what they could achieve by bringing printing in-house and using high-quality printing solutions to wrest back control of their portfolio of company materials.
This enables them to manage usage more efficiently, be more creative and flexible and to produce higher-quality results. And perhaps the ultimate benefit is that SMEs that make the right choice of in-house printing solutions will ultimately reap the rewards in terms of enhanced business agility improvements to the bottom line and greater competitive edge.
