Strategic Finance
Taking your printing in-house |
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| Strategic Finance | |
| Written by Graham Lowes, marketing director, OKI Printing Solutions | |
| Tuesday, 26 January 2010 | |
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How finance firms can gain from smarter printing.
A recent report by economics consultancy, the centre for economics and business research (cebr) finds that the banking and finance sector could save £127 million a year by adopting smarter printing practices. The figure is equivalent to 366,390 Continuing Professional Development half-day training courses at £295.00 + VAT, enough for all (350,000) Citigroup’s employees nationwide. Outsourcing print jobs can be wasteful. Typically, 20% of outsourced printing is never used. Short-run printing of all ordinarily outsourced material up to 1,000 copies is normally cheaper to produce in-house. And this approach allows firms to design and print materials quickly and efficiently while tightly controlling costs. By bringing more work in-house, businesses can gain greater control over their printing. A common problem with financial spreadsheets is that they are often difficult to read as they typically run across several A4 sheets. In such cases, the ability to print on different sizes and shapes of paper, for example, can be a key competitive differentiator. Banner printing capabilities, for example, enable spreadsheets to be output on a single sheet quickly and easily. Flexibility is key in reducing print wastage. Costs can be reduced simply by ensuring printers are configured correctly. And routine use of double-sided printing will potentially save businesses thousands of pounds every year in ink cartridges, paper and general ‘wear and tear’. Financial sector organisations can also cut wastage and minimise environmental impact by implementing an efficient print management strategy. This allows them to deliver a ‘print audit’, enabling them to gauge - and if necessary restrict - employee printing. They can achieve additional savings by educating staff to think in terms of efficient printing. Users can save resources by following the well-known ‘think before your print’ guideline and never printing emails simply to read them. In addition, they can be trained to reduce paper wastage by always using print preview and by using a web print utility, for example. Finally, as the cebr research indicates, the potential benefits of more efficient, smarter printing practices could extend beyond individual businesses to the UK economy as a whole. The consultancy forecasts that a shift to more efficient printing practices could boost GDP by up to £2,840 million and net exports by £220 million as more efficient UK companies compete more effectively across the world. So, with organisations across the financial sector still among the most intensive users of printing solutions today, both these businesses and the wider economy can gain by adopting a smarter, more efficient approach to printing.
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