Issue #0510/1 - Could Leasing and Total Print Management be the answer to poor provision of Hard Copy facilities? Managers want more attention to be paid to hard copy provision.
This week we present part two of the focus group material gathered during February (see TCPglobal Issue #0505 - "Managers scathing of users’ abilities and attitudes towards hard copy" for part one). Having looked at user behaviour, attitudes and skills, together with the needs surrounding hard copy in the first part, we now consider the issues facing organisations, and schools in particular, and some aspects of how hard copy is provided.
Finding high levels of frustration and criticism of the way in which printers (in particular) are provided and managed, feeling in the group ran high that printing is all too often treated as the poor relation in the IT mix.
Consisting of six individuals, the focus group comprised four members of staff from an 1,100-pupil secondary school: the bursar; one member of the senior leadership team; and two heads of department, one of whom is head of IT – plus a senior vice president from the banking sector and one product certification manager from a government research establishment.
All have intense hard copy needs and experience of user behaviour in their own spheres. The only brief to the discussion was:
- attitudes towards hard copy
- user behaviour
- personal needs
Because schools are the training ground for the next generation, with busy timetables and rigorous targets to meet, it is essential that their equipment not only functions correctly and efficiently but is also suitably up-to-date.
Unfortunately, education is also one of the areas of government funding that is not given adequate priority. In an attempt to reverse the funding decline and educational crisis in the UK, the government is encouraging schools to adopt a specialism that will qualify them for additional funding.
While extra funding is very commendable, pupils are immediately disadvantaged in terms of potential for achievement if they are allocated to a school that does not have the specialism suited to that specific pupil.
It also means that only schools with a technology specialism receive extra funding for ICT equipment. In the grand scheme of things, printers tend to fall a long way down the list of priorities, with inadequate numbers of printers available around the school. Printers also tend to be out of date and incapable of handling the high data flows of current graphics applications or cannot offer colour where needed.
Reliability & Problems
This issue affects the efficiency and effectiveness of teaching in any school. Teachers do not have the time to solve technical issues or handle unreliability in their classroom equipment. When 30+ pupils all need to print their classwork at the end of a lesson, the load placed on the printer is considerable. In the school in question, a ‘technology college’, there is a ratio of one printer to every 32 pupils (making no allowance for differentiation between colour and mono printers and the need for both in some environments). In this situation an old or unreliable printer is a liability and completely unacceptable.For instance, teaching staff recently experienced severe problems with an incompatibility between the printer hardware and the software applications in use, causing jobs not to print correctly. This had become so severe that a number of Brother laser printers were replaced by Hewlett-Packard LaserJet printers – a process that solved the problems.
paramount importance
As time progresses, the peaks and troughs in workload will only escalate, thereby escalating the potential for bottlenecks to occur and increasing the likelihood that pupils will press ‘print’ … not see their print job emerge and press ‘print’ again … and again …and again! The bottleneck problem is compounded – the print queue is clogged and grinds to a halt with knock-on implications to the network and for the teaching staff and IT support staff.
Satisfaction is key to the pupils enjoyment of a subject and to their motivation – when their hard work is not rewarded by the satisfaction of seeing their creation on paper, their motivation takes a nose-dive and frustration and disinterest can begin to set in.
Teaching staff and management see leasing as one potential solution to this crisis. It offers the opportunity for the hardware to be kept up to date and appropriate to the tasks in hand.
But, equally important is the issue of after sales support and service.
Viewed as a critical element of the IT mix, this again comes down to the fact that hardware has to be reliable, with a 100% uptime requirement in an environment where teaching staff are responsible for a thousand or more pupils who are on a tight schedule through the education system and whose performance is closely monitored.
Specific criticism was levelled at organisations providing this after sales support, by the school’s head of IT, that payment in advance is often required for ad hoc service or repairs. This is a situation that can result in several days loss of productivity while payment is arranged and delivered and the service visit scheduled so that the equipment can be repaired.
Indeed, 100% uptime is critical to most organisations and applies to the print environment rather more than to the copy environment. This is because where copying is concerned, by its very nature, there is already an original hard copy in existence. In most instances, if the copy hardware is non-functional, either the existing hard copy original can be used temporarily or the job can simply be delayed till the hardware is repaired.
However, with print, again by its very nature, the original exists only in digital format and, as we know, many people prefer to review documents using a paper copy. When a paper copy of a digital document is required, it cannot often wait for the hardware to fixed – an alternative output device has to be found.
Print is also still critical as a record-keeping device. Hard copies are generally required for such functions as financial accounting records (invoices for instance) and also for operational considerations to provide an audit trail. This may be as simple as creating proof that an individual, department or organisation has fulfilled a particular task or function or has made progress in planning an operation.
Moving to the commercial environment, the senior banking manager in the group expressed the view that ‘shared printers are a nightmare’. This largely comes from the feeling that there is a lack of privacy where many users have access to a central machine but also reflects that age-old problem that people want to have their resources immediately to hand and are very reluctant to walk to a shared resource.
Although password protection on printing is now a familiar concept, the feeling is that it is not reliable enough and that queuing to collect the print job can present problems.
While on the subject of queuing, print queues on shared printers can definitely cause efficiency and cost problems, resulting in major levels of wastage. When a print job is held in a queue, meaning that the user does not find that job waiting for them when they first visit the printer, they are inclined to walk away, go back to their desk and press print again working on the assumption that the print job has failed.
In fact, the job is simply waiting its turn and will print in due course but, without taking time to check the print queue and locating the job, the user has no way of knowing this.
Result?
- time is wasted when users return to their desk to press print again (and perhaps again!)
- paper and toner is wasted when the job is printed two, or even three, times
- jobs printed multiple times and abandoned on the printer could contain confidential material
- user frustration at ‘difficulty of printing’ leads to decline in working efficiency and satisfaction
- overall Cost of Printing rises fast
Take a tour around a major office space and you’ll almost certainly see paper left unclaimed on shared printers, as I found taking a tour around the trading floor of a major bank. On average, there must have been at least 100 unclaimed sheets on each printer (and many more on some).
Password printing should be a solution to this problem, as should follow-me printing (‘Shadow Printing’). But, in reality, it seems that there may be some resistance to these solutions and this resistance is certainly centred around the managers’ desire for personal printing. In the working environment of the panel member in question, every manager has a personal inkjet printer for this very reason – consider the cost implications of this, almost certainly outweighing the cost of implementing password printing and possibly follow-me printing as well!!
Follow me wherever I go
Shadow Printing, or Follow-Me Printing, is a means of allowing users to collect their print job from any printer of choice within their organisation without the need to spend time selecting the desired printer in the print settings dialog.
It is activated using a device such as a swipe, or proximity, card and is closely akin to password protected printing.
Benefits of Shadow Printing could be many and varied, depending on the degree of sophistication adopted:
- allows users to access their print jobs wherever and whenever they need with the confidentiality they require.
- security may be increased to levels that are appropriate to the organisation or environment.
- ensures that the organisation has complete control over usage of various hard copy devices by implementing Role Based Access Control procedures (e.g. restricting use of colour machines to certain personnel, providing a deterrent against unauthorised personal use, etc.)
- job accounting is easily implemented by logging jobs as they pass through the Shadow Print queue.
- hard copy costs may easily be allocated to individuals, workgroups, departments, or business units, as appropriate or desirable, either on a pre-pay style credit allocation basis or post-pay system.
- hard copy costs ( particularly in the form of paper and consumables) are also more closely controlled, reducing duplicate printing.
- increases flexibility of the hard copy function in an organisation.
Criticism is also levelled at corporate IT departments for not having an adequate understanding of hard copy or of future requirements concerning hard copy. They are too focussed on PCs, servers and networks and, to them, ‘TCO’ relates only to that environment. TCPglobal has levelled criticism against the major IT news magazines on this very matter – coverage of anything related to print or printers is rare and the concept of Total Cost of Printing seems totally foreign.
For corporations and other large organisations to be serious about minimising operating costs, and in particular outsourcing IT provision and management, they must bring hard copy and a Total Cost of Printing model into their thinking, otherwise they will continue pouring money down the drain with no prospect of staunching the flow.
School wish list
What our school managers would really like is a fleet of low cost laser MFPs across the school – leased and probably with a Total Print Management contract.Multifunction devices are desired partly because they offer all the functionality that is required in both teaching areas and in teacher work rooms. But it is not just for the functionality that they are wanted. Teachers recognise that their job is to prepare pupils for real life after school and for the tasks they will need to perform in their jobs. They also recognise that MFPs are the hard copy device of the future. Therefore, they want pupils to be able to experience and become proficient in the use of the hardware they will encounter.
Leasing holds a definite attraction because of the perception that it will increase flexibility where the hardware is concerned. Schools are constantly under pressure to upgrade simply to cope with ever-increasing demands, new applications that require more memory and to provide higher print speeds to cope with the increasing throughput of work.
Managers in this school hope that leasing might allow them to keep pace with technology and to continue to provide up-to-date hardware and that will continue to offer pupils the experiences they need.
Together with leasing, Total Print Management is a concept that they say ‘would be of interest’. However, there are some concerns that the implementation of a Total Print Management contract might have undesired repercussions in providing a further excuse for users to simply hit ‘Print’ rather than to think about what and how much they are printing.
Introducing this concept should, in fact, have the opposite effect because it would allow much closer management of the hard copy provision, thus making individuals more aware of the cost of printing. It should also allow a more realistic chargeback to be made to departments in the school. The bursar is concerned that there is no realistic model for calculating chargeback – being based on historical costs of hardware when hardware costs are constantly falling. The result is a chargeback that is believed to be far too high because the hardware contribution is unrealistically high.
This means that neither the school as a whole nor the individual departments are getting value for money from the hard copy provision that is made. If the costs were more defined and predictable, the departments could be allocated a higher print allowance for the same expenditure.
From the finance management perspective, the finance department within the school is really only involved in paying the bills. There is certainly no input relating to selection of equipment.
Department heads may have some input at the selection stage as long as their choice falls within the specified budget but there is concern that the levels of expertise amongst the department heads is not adequate for a good choice to be made. The result is that the decision-making is left to a rather ad hoc process.
Recommendations
Within the school environment, but just as applicable to any large organisation, senior staff and managers see two main strategies offering a combination of cost effectiveness and efficiency in the provision of hard copy.Firstly, ensure a high level of commonality of devices across the organisation by minimising the number of different brands and models of device. The reasoning within the group for suggesting this is more associated with a desire for simplicity, convenience and reliability than specific costing issues. However, there are major cost advantages of following this route, including:
- fewer consumables to order
- the opportunity to minimise stock levels of consumables
- reduced administrative time
- reduced maintenance time
Secondly, lease printers and MFPs, rather than buy them. This links closely with adopting a Total Print Management strategy, where the organisation buys pages rather than equipment. Clearly the advantages here (especially for a school) are that costs can be controlled, managed and forecast while maintaining up-to-date hardware that is appropriate to the needs of the users.
~End~
