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Lexmark’s new Print Less, Save More strategy holds out the promise of cost savings of up to 40% and a lower carbon footprint for organisations that implement a managed print service from Lexmark Global Services or one of its resellers. In order to demonstrate the benefits of managing and controlling office printing, the printer company is applying its four-step programme in its own offices, including those of Lexmark UK in Marlow, Bucks and Lexmark France in Suresnes, Paris.

The combination of a global recession and growing environmental awareness means that there has never been a better time to gain control of print costs that Gartner estimates could amount to as much as 1-3% of an enterprise’s turnover. According to Lexmark, this works out at about £300 to £1,000 per employee, depending on the nature of the business.

Print costs include the cost of the devices themselves, toner cartridges,

paper and energy consumption, plus hard-to-measure values, such as the cost of support and lost productivity caused by inefficient printing practices and machine downtime.

In addition to the financial cost of office printing, there is an environmental one. Unlike furniture, which has a negligible impact on the environment between manufacture/distribution/ installation and disposal at end of life, printers are at their most damaging during the usage phase, largely through their use of paper.

“If you look at the lifecycle of a printer and measure its impact on the environment, 94% of that impact is due to paper, toner cartridges and energy

use,” explained Lexmark France general manager Renaud Deschamps. According to Lexmark, the lion’s share of this figure – 80% – is accounted for by paper alone. This explains why paper reduction strategies are such a key component of its four-step MPS proposition, encompassing printer rationalisation; unified device management; the implementation of more efficient printing practices to reduce paper consumption (e.g. two-sided printing); and streamlined document workflows.

Print Less, Save More

To show how its Print Less, Save More programme can be implemented in even small organisations, Lexmark took

Sustainable Times on a tour of its new offices in Suresnes, Paris.

Located on five floors of a modern but unremarkable building in a quiet street off a main thoroughfare beside the Seine, the offices include meeting rooms, a showroom of Lexmark products and office space for 120 workers.

On the day of Sustainable Times’ visit, the offices were quiet, neat, spacious and remarkably empty. Perhaps because of this – or as a result of Lexmark’s waste reduction strategies – there was almost no paper to be seen, not even in the output trays of workgroup printers and MFPs.

It was not always like this. Lexmark France’s old offices in La Defense, Paris were fairly paper-intensive. Each of the four floors had 17 personal and workgroup printers for just 30 people. In total, there were 67 print devices (one for every two employees), producing 508,000 pages per annum. When Lexmark moved to its new offices it had three choices: to replicate the existing printer infrastructure; to replace the 17 devices on each floor with one high volume A3 MFP; or to implement a balanced deployment of four devices per floor.

It chose the third option on the basis that the second would have required workers to walk too far to collect prints, making the re-introduction of personal printers more likely. Lexmark believes that 6 or 7 metres is the furthest you can ask people to go to pick up a print without adversely affecting morale and productivity.

Another benefit of having more than one device per floor is that there

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Paper Cuts

Sustainable Times visited Lexmark’s new Paris offices to see what it is doing to reduce the cost and environmental impact of printing in its own offices

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