“A lot of our corporate customers are nervous about adopting colour,” says Alan McLeish, senior product marketing manager at OKI Printing Solutions. “If there is an option to print in colour people tend to use it by default, which drives up costs. But colour is an everyday part of life and it makes more of an impact that monochrome. You wouldn’t send out a marketing brochure in monochrome, for example. Colour communicates more to the customer.”
McLeish’s comments are backed up by a number of studies that have looked at the impact of colour. A 1997 study by visual journalist and consultant Jan White revealed that colour adverts are read up to 42% more often than the same ad printed in monochrome, while a similar study by the Institute for Color Research found that reactions to colour account for up to 90% of people’s initial impressions when they see a new product.
So how should companies approach a colour printing strategy? McLeish says that they need to look beyond the costs and focus on the people who’ll be using it. “We encourage companies to think about exactly what is going to be printed. Reports? Emails? Companies need to establish exactly what the printer will be used for,” he says.
Enterprises that do embrace a colour printing infrastructure need to find a way of stopping users from printing in colour “by default”, as McLeish puts it. “We offer policy management to enable an organisation to set what certain people can print. Some people, for example, are not allowed to print in colour and others are not allowed to print emails. We’re seeing a growing demand from our customers for that sort of technology,” OKI’s McLeish says, referring to the company’s Colour Access Policy Manager (CAPM), Print Control and PrintSuperVision tools.
Samsung is also seeing increased customer awareness about the merits of colour printing. Kiran Sanghera, B2B IT product marketing manager at the company’s print division, says that tools are available to ensure users only print off what they are entitled to.
“We have User Authentication,” she tells CTBR. “Organisations can set it up so that finance and HR, for example, just print in monochrome, but marketing or PR are allowed colour. We also offer standard mono drivers even on our colour printers.”
While using policies to dictate what people can print and whether they can print in colour works, OKI’s McLeish believes that user education is also vitally important in helping enterprises stay on top of their print costs. “You see messages at the bottom of emails asking people if they really need to print it off,” McLeish says. “But people are still doing it. Page volume is key to costs and people really need to start thinking about whether they need to print or not.”
To help with educating users, OKI has a scheme called Look At What You Can Do!, which aims to help businesses get the most out of their print infrastructure. The subjects range from printing business cards to producing creative documents without breaking the bank.
Keeping control of costs
Research from French print management software company Doxense suggests that an organisation with around 1,000 people on the printer network can expect to produce about 7.8 million pages over the course of a year. Of these up to 20% will never be read, and 20% will be printed in colour when colour printing is not needed. This results in a huge waste of time and resources for organisations.
A report by analyst house IDC claims that a balanced deployment of printers can produce savings of up to 23% in typical enterprise deployments, based on industry averages which suggest a poorly managed printing regime can cost around £400 a year a head in some organisations. Similarly, market research firm InfoTrends has claimed that for every £1 spent on printing a document in the office, another £9 is spent on other burdened costs that are not being exposed, such as departmental stationery budgets or budgets that are consolidated under the umbrella of invoices.
“Studies have claimed that print costs can be between 3% and 5% of a company’s total costs, plus some hidden costs that they don’t consider,” agrees McLeish. OKI is trying to make print costs clearer for its customers with the recent launch of the C610 and C711 devices.
The C610 features a low cost per page, which OKI says gives it the best price:performance ratio in its class. The firm says that the C711 uses high-yield toners and a long life image drum to offer the lowest possible cost per page.
Both devices are also highly energy efficient, which helps reduce the total cost of ownership. “One of the things the print industry has been doing recently is making sure that the products themselves are greener,” says McLeish. “Very few people actually turn off a printer at the end of the day and IT would be inundated with reports saying the printer was offline. But these new printers consume 1.2 watts when idle, which is down from around 17 watts in other models.”
OKI has also implemented a cartridge recycling scheme where customers can print off an address label and send the empty cartridge back to OKI, who then either refill it or recycle it. McLeish says that while it’s very easy for people to just throw cartridges away when they’re empty, providing firms with an address label makes the process much easier.
Returning back to the colour versus monochrome debate, McLeish concludes by saying that it’s about time companies started thinking more about their print infrastructure and the costs associated with it.
“Some companies buy a colour print set up and then complain that it’s too expensive because of all the costs around it,” McLeish says. “They need to think about it much more. If they have one eye on the future and think that they may need a colour printer at some point, then they should go for it now, to save themselves reinvesting at a later date.”
