Print Audit For Real – A Case Study

Can You Afford to Do Nothing?
If one of our Clients chose this route they would be throwing away £170k per year, every year.

Overwhelmed by offers too good to be true and perhaps thinking that it is going to be a hassle and will probably end up costing money, is a situation that many organisations find themselves in. So inevitably they do nothing and keep incurring costs which are very easily identified and removed with the right action.

So why bother with an Independent Print Audit as a first step to reducing your print & copying costs? Here is a real example showing how Greig Ross Associates implemented a Print Audit and identified how an English Local Authority could achieve significant savings by implementing some simple actions.

Here is Why You Need to Take Action - Headline Print Audit Results (per annum)

What the Print Audit clearly identified is that the Local Authority, in line with almost all organisations, had lost management focus on how printing and copying was implemented, resulting in an unauthorised escalation in the number of printers, models and associated costs.

The Environmental Costs
In addition to the monetary costs there are the environmental costs that need to be understood. Like all Local Authorities in the UK, our client is under extreme pressure from Government to reduce their Carbon Footprint. Here we have shown the real impact of the total amount of printing that takes place each year by our client’s users.

Annual Paper Usage Representation

How Much Will A Print Audit Cost?
The cost of implementing a Print Audit, preparing the results and recommending the way forward is typically in the region of 10-15 days of effort, which is a modest investment compared to the savings that can be achieved.

What Happens During a Print Audit – Will it disrupt my Operations?
With our Local Authority client it took just 6 weeks to unobtrusively capture print information (4 weeks), prepare the results and form a joint plan of action (2 weeks).

A Print Audit is implemented in such a way that it is completely transparent and has no impact on day to day operations. Following a short call with the IT Department of the Local Authority, the Print Audit software was automatically distributed to all computers to enable all printing actions to be captured and stored. Our experience shows us that it is important to discuss with the IT Department how the whole printer estate is set up to ensure that accurate information is recorded.

There are no personnel onsite during the entire Print Audit process other than for the presentation of the results and action plan.

What Happens When the Audit is Completed?
A concise report and action plan is prepared utilising the experience Greig Ross has built up in this area. The report provided to our Local Authority client has a very clear focus on the overall printing practices of the users, e.g. how many pages each person prints per year with costs, the split between colour and black and white, single or double sided. Like our other clients, the Local Authority users predominantly printed between 1-3 pages at a time. Some investigation has shown that this is mainly emails.

Following distribution of the report to our Local Authority client, a meeting of the senior team was set up and a presentation of the results delivered. Once our clients have recovered from the shock of how their organisation has allowed a costly situation to evolve, the main part of the meeting focuses on the next steps and how to realise the savings identified in the report.

What Are The Next Steps?
To achieve the best possible outcome we recommend that our clients change their existing arrangements and where possible implement a managed print service with one of the many companies offering such services. This will immediately realise the expected cost savings. From Greig Ross’s perspective, the Print Audit is not completed until the new arrangement are in place and are very happy to work with our clients in the selection of a partner.

Being independent means that we are not allied to any company or supplier and can offer an objective view when placing new contracts to ensure our clients achieve best cost.

However, these actions do not address behavioural issues that drive needless printing in the first place. Following the print review we offer undertaking a short piece of work to really understand what is being printed and why and deliver a set of actions that will radically reduce the total print volume and therefore costs which are in addition to those achieved through implementing the recommendations in the Print Audit report.

Conclusion
As a printing specialist we have a well tried and tested approach to identifying savings for our clients and how the organisation should change to reduce the total volume of what is printed. What is hard however is taking the first step and keeping relentless management focus on implementing new contractual arrangements and implementing behavioural changes throughout the organisation to achieve significant cost savings and reductions in Carbon Footprint.

We have helped many organisations take the first step and walked with them until the savings have been achieved.

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