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The Last Unmanaged Cost Center!
Procurement departments may have found the cheapest toner price … or the lowest cost of printers. But they are buying way too much of the wrong things simply because, when it comes to document output costs, there is no management, no planning. It's the very last unmanaged cost center in business!
That's not just my opinion. It's what analysts were saying at the MPS 2009 European Conference in Amsterdam. And what they were prescribing is Managed Print Services (MPS) -- a quantifiable, predictable, controllable solution for companies that have budgets, but whose decisions about how to spend them are made on the fly without planning. According to the analysts, companies ought to stop buying, and assess and plan before doing anything else.
Indeed, the very fact that MPS is being tracked by industry analysts indicates how far it has come in the last five years. It's evolved from a bundled toner-and-repairs package to a far more sophisticated, comprehensive program that includes optimization of the printer fleet and process improvement. And it's being marketed by all the major OEMs -- Canon, Hewlett-Packard, Ricoh, Xerox, and so on. But don't fool yourself; the OEMs want to sell printers.
What these OEMs are saying is that organizations are giving decision-making responsibility for printer fleet management and consumables to operational people or committees who don't see the potential benefit of optimization and process improvement; they still have in their heads the traditional paradigm of repair agreements and consumables purchasing.
But there's a new paradigm. And some people are recognizing that. For instance, DuPont Chemical and the Municipality of Uppsala, Sweden are growing their own MPS competencies with internal service bureaus. They plan to go beyond cost control and fleet optimization to squeeze out what HP says could be a 75% cost savings on improving workflow.
But you can't improve what you can't measure, which is why dashboard metrics -- or key performance indicators -- are critical. We said that back in July -- when we listed a few basic dashboard metrics -- and we're saying it again now. The concept of MPS has matured because the tools needed to track and monitor printers -- which weren't available even a year ago -- are now being developed. And with those tools, MPS -- which is all about deploying the right equipment for the right function at the right time -- will mature further still.
So what is the take-away here? It's this:
- MPS is much larger than most people even imagine in terms of the service level to their organization. If you are blissfully happy because you are buying cheap toner and fixing your printers in the usual way, don't be. The world has changed and there's a huge amount of cost savings that still can be squeezed out of document output costs.
If you're interested in learning more about MPS
-- about how, as the analysts are saying, you ought to stop buying, and assess and plan before doing anything else -- click here. We'd be more than happy to come in and give you the details.
And you can print that!
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Brett Don of Dickstein Shapiro LLP
 Brett C. Don has been CIO of Washington, D.C.-based Dickstein Shapiro LLP for two years now. With over 20 years of experience in the legal technology industry, he was previously CIO at Wiley Rein LLP. He recently took a few minutes to chat about some of his current strategic initiatives.
Advantage: I understand that you are reorganizing the administrative services for which you are responsible. How is that going?
Brett Don: We've recently reorganized into three business units. One is informational technology, which includes the traditional IT services. The second is our practice solutions and e-discovery group that includes litigation support, legal research, and business analysis services. The third is our risk and compliance group delivering records, new business intake, and litigation docketing services. So you can see that I have been given responsibility for a pretty broad and varied set of services to the attorneys here.
Advantage: You have said that you believe that outsourcing some of the non-strategic work -- like printer management -- would give you additional time to concentrate on the strategic issues.
Don: Absolutely.
Advantage: Do you outsource your printer management currently?
Don: No, but we're looking at that as a possible option. We run ourselves like a service business and so it has to be cost-effective for us to do that.
Advantage: What do you believe would be the advantages and disadvantages of outsourcing?
Don: I don't know that there are any disadvantages. If we can offload that to a trusted business partner at the same or less cost than we can do it ourselves internally, to me that makes good business sense. And then, in turn, it would allow me to take those human resources and redirect them to the more strategic work.
Advantage: What sort of strategic initiatives are keeping you busy these days?
Don: The one that really excites me is crafting an information management strategy. Today attorneys are generating gigabytes of relevant information every day and storing it in various repositories using their own unique methods; everybody does it differently. For a large firm like ours, that creates all sorts of inefficiencies and risks. And so we're embarking on this multi-phase, multi-year effort to accomplish a few things, starting with consolidating all the numerous data repositories where we can, and then creating a standard set of work processes, protocols, and policies for how business information is stored, categorized, and organized across our offices. Then we'll offer an extensive training program for our attorneys and staff on those processes and procedures so we can get the majority of our firm moving in the same direction toward what I believe is the end goal -- an electronic master file for each client matter.
Another initiative is development of a "risk register," which is a database of the many risks that law firms are likely to face today. Our system will allow us to capture and organize all the research we conduct on what we should do about a given risk, how to best mitigate that risk, the probability of that risk happening, and what impact such a risk would have on the firm. Investing in this knowledge-base is going to drastically change the way we prioritize our risk management efforts and track our decisions related to those risks so that there's no question as to why or when we took certain actions around a particular risk.
Those are just two strategic initiatives that are high on my priority list at the moment.
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Reader Survey |
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We here at Advantage put a lot of time and effort into creating this e-newsletter which we hope you find interesting and informative. We'd sure like to learn how we're doing.
The best way to do that, we believe, is to ask you to take just a few minutes to fill out a simple survey. We promise it will take no longer than that, honest!
To thank you for your input, we'd like to send you a free, handy TRAVEL JOURNAL for you to keep your notes.
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Please respond by Feb. 7th.
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About Us |
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Advantage Enterprises delivers advisory and managed print services, primarily to professional service firms so they can focus on their highest and best purpose of billing their time and growing their client base.
For over 20 years, Advantage's environmentally green
lifecycle management programs have increased productivity
of printing and imaging fleets and cut costs while
saving the environment.
To learn more about what gives the top law firms their
competitive edge, please visit our Web site at www.advtg.com
or e-mail us at
marketing@advtg.com. |
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