Managing a printing budget

[dgsmith]

I have been asked to discuss with our HT tomorrow our printing budget for the next 12 months (well, 10 months now I guess!) and I am curious as to what kind of budget, or expenditure, other schools have in this regard. I am keen for the head to know how our expenditure compares, as I believe I have negotiated some very attractive and value for money deals as far as purchasing toners/inks is concerned.

 

It'd be great if I could get some feedback on the following:

 

- Setup (managed print solution, fully maintained in-house or mixture, OEM/compat carts?)

- Devices (specifically looking at just printers, not including photocopiers as we manage that separately and wouldn't be an accurate comparison for me)

- Budget/expenditure (how much you usually spend on average every year, how this roughly has changed over the last 2 years and what is your budget/est spending for this year)

- Type/size of school (state or private, primary or secondary, # students etc)

 

In our case, we're a ~740 intake secondary state with approx 26 printers and a current annual consumable budget expenditure of around £3500-£3800 + VAT. We manage all our printers ourselves and I negotiate costs with suppliers which for us works out cheaper than managed print setup (though we use 99% compatibles).

[MatthewL]

To me that doesn't seem too bad for that cost.

 

I have implemented 2 managed solutions before and on phase 1 of a third, the biggest thing I like is with the software we have we can see what is been printed by who and how much, you could purchase this yourself add it to your server.

 

With devices for me know I prefer an all in one copier lease as then any hardware issues they can sort it.

 

I work in Health not an education environment but one site I took out 70 desktop printers and replaced with 2 copiers, another site was some 70 devices between 2 buildings and replaced with 2 copier on each site.

 

One thing I would recommend doing is monthly taking readings from existing devices and work out your usage as one of the first things a company who try and sell you a managed solution will do this. Do it yourself and then you know what you are really using.

 

What is your current fleet made up of? It sounds like you are half way there managing your budget by not having loads of printers. Secondly I would recommend on auditing what you are printing, we have a release setup so jobs are not printed till they are released, this saves us loads, I look at what is deleted after not been collected after 3 days and its quite a bit!

 

Any questions ask, I will try and help you. It was the best thing I ever did go to a managed solution.

[dgsmith]

We run papercut for logging/releasing etc so that side of things is ok. It's more arranging the budget that we need to be careful on. What I don't want is for the head to think that we have "got by ok" on the same budget last year that the same amount would be "max" and there would be further savings available, which there aren't, so if I can give some figures for other schools of a similar size (or other schools in general of any size) it would help the case.

 

Our current fleet largely is colour lasers with monos in offices - a mixture of HP/Brother and Konica Minolta (Konicas in the highest use areas). Our problems mainly is that we have a large variation of printers rather than colidating to a single or handful of different types of printers so we have to stock many types of toners - something I am working on sorting out, gradually, on a non-existant budget!

 

Obviously our environment is different to health so printers in main classrooms are needed (some schools may share a printer for several, but where we have 10+ computers we have to have a printer for that batch!

 

We're not looking for a managed solution, though would be of interest to see what others pay on such an arrangement, if anything to show it'd cost us more!

[dgsmith]

Are we so fortunate that no other school has a budget for printing then anymore?

[Edu-IT]

We're not looking for a managed solution, though would be of interest to see what others pay on such an arrangement, if anything to show it'd cost us more!

Take into account though the cost of your time in ordering consumables, fixing the printers and also the cost if one breaks down. You can't base the cost just on consumables alone.

 

I'd be happy to give you an idea of what we pay, if you want to drop me a PM.

[localzuk]

I can't give you a direct comparison - no-one kept a track of it all previously. We are looking at a managed solution for our entire campus (consists of a 650 intake secondary, a 400 intake primary, a 100 intake special school and an exclusion unit with a couple of dozen in), with them printing about 1.6million pages a year, 400k colour, 1.2m mono. We have the 2 main copiers in secondary, and another copier there too, 2 copiers in the special school and one in primary. We then have about 10 other printers around the site.

 

We would be replacing all of these with a single managed solution with MFDs everywhere - all under one system as copying and printing can't really be split apart in our experience.

 

Our yearly costs are around £28k a year at the moment for all that (we own the printers outright), and the new solution would introduce new machines everywhere and our costs would go to around £36k a year. The biggest pain for the current solution is the amount of time and effort we have to spend getting toners, and fixing printers. If we us compatibles, we spend more time fixing printers as they inevitably cause issues, if we use originals then our costs go up.

[gshaw]

If we us compatibles, we spend more time fixing printers as they inevitably cause issues, if we use originals then our costs go up.

 

Depends on what compatibles you use... ours are supplied from a company who does the refurb work themselves and they also do printer repairs as part of their business. If one of their toners causes a printer fault they come and fix it. Saved us around 50% on the cost of HP toners.

 

I'd like to move to Papercut or similar for printer monitoring and in time replace more of our admin printers with MFPs... not so sure about the classrooms as there are issues using a shared devices with students \ teachers leaving the room to collect print outs.

[dgsmith]

Take into account though the cost of your time in ordering consumables, fixing the printers and also the cost if one breaks down. You can't base the cost just on consumables alone.

 

I'd be happy to give you an idea of what we pay, if you want to drop me a PM.

 

There isn't really a time element any more than there would be for making orders in general, as the prices are already negotiated. Perhaps also we have been lucky to have very few problems arise from the remans we now use, so essentially for us the cost really is the cost of the actual cartridges. Printers can and will break whether you use OEM or compats, but I still think if one did go bang, we're still cheaper off to replace it compared to what we're paying to run them.

If you'd rather PM that's fine.

 

Our yearly costs are around £28k a year at the moment for all that (we own the printers outright), and the new solution would introduce new machines everywhere and our costs would go to around £36k a year. The biggest pain for the current solution is the amount of time and effort we have to spend getting toners, and fixing printers. If we us compatibles, we spend more time fixing printers as they inevitably cause issues, if we use originals then our costs go up.

 

£28k?? Moving to 36k?!?! I regard that as quite outrageous! Where on earth does that money come from! Even throwing 5k our way would more than double our budget!

 

Depends on what compatibles you use... ours are supplied from a company who does the refurb work themselves and they also do printer repairs as part of their business. If one of their toners causes a printer fault they come and fix it. Saved us around 50% on the cost of HP toners.

 

I'd like to move to Papercut or similar for printer monitoring and in time replace more of our admin printers with MFPs... not so sure about the classrooms as there are issues using a shared devices with students \ teachers leaving the room to collect print outs.

 

Same here for compats/remans.. from a company that largely remanufactures their own so they know the process it's been through and thus can diagnose any issues directly.