OKI advises businesses on smarter printing
October 9th, 2009 Posted in General, Industry NewsMassive cost and carbon savings at stake
Printer maker OKI has called on UK organisations to better utilise latest print technologies to drive productivity, cut waste and improve the environmental footprint of office operations by smartening up printing procedures.
A major study carried out for the vendor by The Centre for Economics and Business Research has found that smarter printing could save the public and private sectors across the UK between £900 million and £2,100 million per year on printing costs, it said today.
The study was conducted to assess the state of inhouse and outsourced printing services in the context of the current economic and environmental climate, Phil Scrase, UK MD and VP for OKI Printing Solutions told us.
A subsequent report called Smarter print management – controlling costs and environmental impacts in the UK, estimates that £360 million could be saved by moving expensive outsourced printing in‐house.
“Improvements in print technology mean many of the needs of high quality documents or special print jobs can be met using inhouse print resources, which can lead to small savings that net up to significant gains,” he said.
He explained that use of software like Oki’s Template Manager can be used to produce professional looking documents, with ease, in-house reducing the need to outsource stationery, business card, flyers, posters, or brochure print jobs.
Scrase said that enterprise print is very diverse and enterprise printers can increasingly be configured to handle a variety of different jobs and media formats. Some devices will automatically recognise a print job and set up the printer with paper stock or media that best suits it.
Oki also suggests that the thresholds of professional print have been lowered and it is no longer a rule of thumb that print runs in excess of 1,000 are better outsourced to a specialist print shop.
Another aspect of smarter printing is to improve the effectiveness of bulk mail-shots, by running marketing or sales campaigns as a series of smaller print volumes that more easily be managed.
This move to printing smaller volumes inhouse and mailing in batches, means an end to outsourced bulk print and mail services. Instead, mailings are broken down into chunks and sales leads closed out in series as they develop, rather than being followed up after a single bulk mail operation.
Scrase said, “We believe this sort of smarter printing approach can produce savings for the organisation and savings on the macro scale too.”
The largest potential beneficiary sectors of more efficient printing are estimated to be education, architectural activities and public administration and defence. In education CEBR estimates savings of £245 million are possible, which it reckons is equivalent to 9,800 new graduate teachers.
The wider environmental consequences of improvements in print efficiency could also be substantial.
“The benefit of more efficient printing processes translates into savings of 170,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year,” Scrase said.
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