Thanks for the presentation Mark. This sounds like it was a great success for you and your company.

I've always found it difficult to remove desktop printers. In addition to the productivity issue that is sited (sometimes without merit), managers often site confidentiaility as a reason to keep their personal desktop printers. I usually implement a new policy for the circumstances under which someone is allowed to have a desktop printer and then stop supporting anyone else with a printer. This way I don't remove a printer from someone who has one, but if anything happens to it, it is removed and not replaced.

Did you do something similar or do you have other ideas about how to implement this change in the organizations?
Mark Bailey wrote:
The problem:
For mineral company Thiele Kaolin, paper is a major source of revenue.

Until recently, it was also a bloated expenditure.

The Georgia company mines and refines kaolin—a mineral used in paint and paper. And it had no idea how much was being spent on printing.

IT work orders were overloaded with printing problems. In fact, 25 percent of orders were related to printers! Thiele Kaolin had IT professionals actually dedicated to fixing printing problems at the company, which employs about 500 people.

That’s where Mark Bailey, manager of information services, came in.

He knew the situation was unacceptable, especially in a tough economy.


The solution:

Bailey found plenty of online resources. But he could not find anyone to actually help implement a cost-effective program.

So he approached printing vendors. One agreed.

After an in-depth performance study, he and the vendor eliminated desktop printers and other inefficient processes, while, at the same time, making sure employees had the resources they needed.

“Just by paying attention,” Bailey says, “we found huge cost savings.”

By talking with vendors, and company management, and assessing Thiele Kaolin’s printing habits, Bailey was able to save 30 percent on printing costs.


Your take:
Does your company have an efficient printing program? What are some best (and worst) practices you’ve seen regarding the use of printers at work? What are some things companies can do to save money on paper, maintenance and other costs associated with printing?

The problem:
For mineral company Thiele Kaolin, paper is a major source of revenue.

Until recently, it was also a bloated expenditure.

The Georgia company mines and refines kaolin—a mineral used in paint and paper. And it had no idea how much was being spent on printing.

IT work orders were overloaded with printing problems. In fact, 25 percent of orders were related to printers! Thiele Kaolin had IT professionals actually dedicated to fixing printing problems at the company, which employs about 500 people.

That’s where Mark Bailey, manager of information services, came in.

He knew the situation was unacceptable, especially in a tough economy.


The solution:

Bailey found plenty of online resources. But he could not find anyone to actually help implement a cost-effective program.

So he approached printing vendors. One agreed.

After an in-depth performance study, he and the vendor eliminated desktop printers and other inefficient processes, while, at the same time, making sure employees had the resources they needed.

“Just by paying attention,” Bailey says, “we found huge cost savings.”

By talking with vendors, and company management, and assessing Thiele Kaolin’s printing habits, Bailey was able to save 30 percent on printing costs.


Your take:
Does your company have an efficient printing program? What are some best (and worst) practices you’ve seen regarding the use of printers at work? What are some things companies can do to save money on paper, maintenance and other costs associated with printing?

Hi Linda,

Thank you for your feedback. I agree that it is a challenge to remove desktop printers. Your approach sounds like a good one. I have considered writing printer policies but have not done so yet. We have spent a lot of time working with the organization to determine where printers need to be located and fortunately our employees have been very receptive. That is not to say that I believe we are perfect… there are probably areas where we could make additional improvements and we will continue looking for opportunities to improve. So far though, we have been able to manage this change process through our organizational acceptance and by providing better information to the business which I will discuss in a moment.

I feel that each I.T. manager needs to understand their own environment and design a solution that will best fit their organization’s needs. I do not believe there is a cookie cutter approach that can be applied to the problem of device to employee ratio. In the presentation I believe I stated that we removed desktop printers, but what I meant to say is that we removed consumer grade desktop printers. Not only were we spending a lot of money in supporting all of our different printers, we were also wasting money by allowing consumer grade inkjet printers (which are much more costly to operate) to invade our environment. It is difficult to put an exact cost on per page print from an inkjet printer due to different coverage of print jobs (how much ink is used), but there are ways to estimate that cost in order to compare it to dry ink. There are studies available for comparing inkjet costs against laser printing costs. With our negotiated contract, we now have fixed costs for our black and white and color prints so we can tell exactly how much we spend. Using commercial grade printers, we are able to monitor our printers remotely and gather meter readings. We can quickly see where there is a need for additional printers or areas where printers may be underutilized.

There are situations that still require us to provide a dedicated printer for an employee or a small group of employees. For example, in our Payroll department we have a dedicated printer which prints payroll checks. We would not want to expose these checks to being printed in a centralized location, so we installed a dedicated printer. For smaller jobs which also require security, we use the “secure print” feature on our centralized multi-function devices and train our employees on how to use the feature.

In some cases, user acceptance has helped us accomplish our goals simply. In each of our divisional Shipping departments, we had a dot matrix printer which would occasionally break or fail. This required us to keep a spare dot matrix printer on hand in case we had a failure. We also had to be prepared to send an I.T. person at a moment’s notice since the business process is critical. Our vendor worked with us to develop a way to print on multi-part forms on our centralized laser printers. The solution proved to be much quieter, faster, and more reliable than printing to a dot matrix printer and the users adopted it immediately. An added benefit is that if the primary Shipping printer fails, an employee can load the multi-part paper into another laser printer at the site and finish printing the bills of lading. This saves Shipping time from having to wait for someone to come out and repair or replace the printer and ensures that truck drivers are not delayed.

By better understanding our print environment, we are able to provide the business with information to make better decisions on where printers should be located and where the money is actually being spent.

Thanks again for your feedback and your question.

Best regards,
Mark


Linda Hughes wrote:
Thanks for the presentation Mark. This sounds like it was a great success for you and your company.

I've always found it difficult to remove desktop printers. In addition to the productivity issue that is sited (sometimes without merit), managers often site confidentiaility as a reason to keep their personal desktop printers. I usually implement a new policy for the circumstances under which someone is allowed to have a desktop printer and then stop supporting anyone else with a printer. This way I don't remove a printer from someone who has one, but if anything happens to it, it is removed and not replaced.

Did you do something similar or do you have other ideas about how to implement this change in the organizations?
Mark Bailey wrote:
The problem:
For mineral company Thiele Kaolin, paper is a major source of revenue.

Until recently, it was also a bloated expenditure.

The Georgia company mines and refines kaolin—a mineral used in paint and paper. And it had no idea how much was being spent on printing.

IT work orders were overloaded with printing problems. In fact, 25 percent of orders were related to printers! Thiele Kaolin had IT professionals actually dedicated to fixing printing problems at the company, which employs about 500 people.

That’s where Mark Bailey, manager of information services, came in.

He knew the situation was unacceptable, especially in a tough economy.


The solution:

Bailey found plenty of online resources. But he could not find anyone to actually help implement a cost-effective program.

So he approached printing vendors. One agreed.

After an in-depth performance study, he and the vendor eliminated desktop printers and other inefficient processes, while, at the same time, making sure employees had the resources they needed.

“Just by paying attention,” Bailey says, “we found huge cost savings.”

By talking with vendors, and company management, and assessing Thiele Kaolin’s printing habits, Bailey was able to save 30 percent on printing costs.


Your take:
Does your company have an efficient printing program? What are some best (and worst) practices you’ve seen regarding the use of printers at work? What are some things companies can do to save money on paper, maintenance and other costs associated with printing?