Keep convenient personal printers from cutting into profits

Even the best-written managed services contract may not thwart human nature.

That’s a realization that some solution providers are coming to after their usage assessment tools recorded lower-than-expected page volumes from networked printers and multifunction products managed under a cost per page (CPP) contract, says John MacInnes, president and CEO of Print Audit (http://www.printaudit.com/).

The company sells print tracking and auditing tools to help solution providers and end users monitor printing and usage rates in enterprises. One of Print Audit’s customers is

Danwood Working Solutions, an office solutions supplier with 29 branches United Kingdom and Ireland. Among Danwood’s offerings are printers and MFPs managed under CPP contracts. The company had estimated that 60 percent of the documents its clients created were produced by CPP devices, although subsequent audits eventually uncovered much lower totals, MacInnes says.

The problem: Employees at customer sites operated large numbers of desktop printers that were set as default output devices because of their convenient location. As a result, Danwood was capturing only about 20 percent of the available volumes, which meant much lower revenues than what was forecast in the pre-contract evaluations.

Danwood set a new goal of increasing CPP volumes by 60 percent over two years, and used a combination of auditing software and rules-based printing to help enforce this strategy.

After three months, Danwood increased CPP volumes by 12 percent, MacInnes says. Rules based printing gave the company a way to encourage users to print to more efficient devices and better manage color usage. The result is cost savings for its customers and increased profits for Danwood, he adds.