* Xerox Office Document Assessments aim to show where money can be saved
Does the thought of saving an average of $30 per month for every office worker in your enterprise without sacrificing anything interest you? Over the course of a year, the savings could add up to hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars, and the investment to recoup this money is a fraction of what you save.
No, this is not some Internet scam that is too good to be true. It’s a tried and true discipline that hundreds of companies have undertaken. What is it? Here’s a hint: if you printed this newsletter before reading it, the answer is at your fingertips.
I’m talking about a thorough Office Document Assessment (ODA) from Xerox. The company developed this service in 1996, and since then has completed nearly 300 customer engagements that have shown clients how to save vast sums of money through managing digital output.
An ODA is a disciplined study lasting five or six weeks that assesses everything about digital output – printing, scanning, faxing, copying – in your enterprise. You probably have a lot of waste in these activities that is basically a huge chest of money invisible to you now. It’s the result of an unmanaged output infrastructure that is growing out of control. You can liken it to the days of the unmanaged desktop, where support costs were skyrocketing and you couldn’t keep up with what users were doing.
But there is hope for getting these costs under control. I recently talked with Pat Dugan, a principal in the Document Consulting Group of Xerox Global Services. He’s the “father of the ODA” and he has worked on many of the company’s engagements. After seven years of conducting these studies, he says that Xerox can make predictions of what it will discover at the typical enterprise. Though every company is unique in its applications, output habits – and areas of waste – are similar.
According to Dugan, here are the main problem areas for companies that haven’t yet implemented managed digital output:
* There are too many output devices. Counting devices that print, copy, scan and/or fax, most companies have an average of one device for every two people. The biggest category is stand-alone printers. Usually, it wasn’t planned this way; these devices just cropped up over the years.
* Printers are largely underutilized. Xerox has found that, on average, the typical printer is in use 1.7% of the time. Xerox recommends about 6% utilization. You lose money on the printer at less than 3% utilization, and encounter user satisfaction issues at greater than 8% utilization.
* It costs a lot to buy supplies for so many devices. The cost of putting pixels on a page is high, especially if you have older, less efficient devices. Migrating to a more cost effective output infrastructure (e.g., fewer devices that are networked) saves on supplies.
* Unmanaged devices cost a lot to support. A fragmented and complex hodgepodge of output devices has high costs in terms of break/fix, help desk and asset management. Moreover, it engages the user for support. A new infrastructure that is totally networked offers new tools to manage the devices. You can be proactive about support before an event actually happens (e.g., toner is low), and you get better accounting of your assets and better reporting of their use.
Xerox uses a Six Sigma-based process that is fact-based and data driven to remove the defects from a system. In this case, “the system” is your enterprise output processes, which include break/fix support, supplies, asset management, help desk, and procurement. Through an ODA, Xerox recommends how to integrate this system to remove a lot of cost.
Xerox “Black Belt” and “Green Belt” consultants conduct a thorough yet rapid and unobtrusive assessment of your company processes. One of the deliverables of the study is a professional business case you can take to the chief financial officer to show the costs and benefits as well as the discounted cash flow of managing your digital output. Depending on your company size and geographic disbursement, an ODA typically costs under $50,000 – a small amount relative to the potential returns that could range in the millions, annually.
If you need help justifying a study, try the Xerox Office Productivity Advisor (XOPA) service. It’s a Web-based total cost of ownership analysis tool that can help you understand how much you are currently spending for your output environment.
Dugan offers one other thought about the ODA. The ROI that you can expect from the study and your ensuing infrastructure updates depends on how you frame the problem. If you’re just looking to replace old stand-alone printers with new networked ones, you’ll get one rate of return. If you broaden your study to include the work processes and document flow, you can achieve a higher rate of return. Xerox Global Services can help you with either approach.
Why not start 2004 by telling the chief financial officer you’ll help him save a few million bucks a year? That can’t be bad for your career!
Linda Musthaler is vice president of Currid & Company. You can write to her at mailto:Linda.Musthaler@currid.com
