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is always backup should a printer fail. This has both productivity and ﬁnancial beneﬁts, as it removes the need to pay for expensive support contracts with four-hour response rates. Lexmark has standardised on A4 devices on the four ﬂoors of ofﬁce space, as they cost less to buy, take up less room, consume less energy than A3 devices and meet 95% of print requirements. Each L-shaped ﬂoor has two B&W MFPs (with colour scanning); one B&W printer and one colour printer. In addition, there are two A3 devices on the ground ﬂoor that can be used for longer print runs or the small minority of print jobs that require A3 paper sizes or advanced ﬁnishing options, such as colour marketing documents that are now printed on-demand.

By reducing the size of its printer ﬂeet from 67 to 20 devices, Lexmark has cut direct costs by 44%. But the new infrastructure also has on-going savings: the cost of consumables is down by 25% per annum and energy consumption is 55% lower.

Further savings have come from more efﬁcient printing practices that have helped Lexmark reduce paper consumption by 43%, from 508,000 to 288,000 pages per annum.

These savings have been achieved by setting two-sided (duplex) printing as the default – “We have pre-click duplex and because we are lazy we never unclick it,” Deschamps said – and by implementing Secure Printing to eliminate unnecessary printing, maintain data security and provide a record of printer usage. “We cut the number of pages printed from 508,000 to 403,700 by eliminating the pages we didn’t need to print. Then duplex took this down to 288,000 sheets of paper,” Deschamps explained.

Secure print is a key element of Lexmark’s managed print services, and not just because it eliminates wasteful printing. According to Deschamps, it also helps overcome one of the most common objections to printer rationalisation – the loss of conﬁdentiality.

“Data security and conﬁdentiality is a focus of IT departments. You have to go through ﬁrewalls and passwords to get to data but then you can print on a device that can be visited by anyone. There is a disconnect between the effort that has been put into IT security over the past 30 years and the amount that has been focused on the printed document,” he said.

Deschamps believes that this “disconnect” is a major cause of wasteful printing practices.

“Conﬁdentiality is the number one blocking factor for rationalising a printer infrastructure,” he said. “If you want to replace desktop printers with workgroup MFPs, the ﬁrst thing people will tell you is that they want a personal printer for conﬁdentiality reasons.”

Lexmark’s solution is a Secure Print system that keeps print jobs on the server until the user has identiﬁed himself at the printer of his choice. Secure printing has three beneﬁts: it guarantees data security, as print jobs will only be printed when the originator is there to collect the hard copy; it prevents people from printing documents and then forgetting to pick them up or leaving them too long in a shared output tray where they can become mixed together and need to be reprinted; and it stops people from printing documents just for the sake of it – research carried out by Ipsos for Lexmark indicates that one in ﬁve pages goes straight to the waste bin without ever being read. The simplest form of secure printing – entering a PIN code on the device itself

– is a standard feature of many printers. However, at Suresnes, Lexmark uses a more sophisticated and seamless system based on the swipe cards that employees use to enter the building. When someone wants to print a document, he clicks a single, universal print icon and the print job is sent to the server where it remains until the user swipes his badge at any device on the network. If the user is at a printer with a touch-screen display, he will be able to select the print job he requires from a list, but if he is at one without an e-Task interface, all print jobs in his personal queue will be printed.

At Suresnes, Secure Printing is applied to all devices but as Eric Crump, Lexmark EMEA manager of Large Accounts Solution and Services Support, points out, there is no reason why it can’t be limited to speciﬁc devices on which it is important to monitor and control usage. “One customer put a badge reader on their colour printer and the number of colour pages printed declined by 50%,” he said.

Step four of a Lexmark managed print service is the on-going appraisal of existing processes to see how workﬂows can be redesigned to reduce paper consumption, for example by using the scanning capability of MFPs to implement electronic workﬂows. The beneﬁt of this exercise will be greatest for businesses that have paper-intensive processes, such as loans approval, but any organisation will have tasks that can be streamlined. For example, at Suresnes, Lexmark has removed the need for photocopying by setting up a shared hard drive where people can store PDFs of scanned documents that others can access and download.

In the current economic climate, it is not easy to square the need to economise with the desire to introduce more sustainable business practices. Gaining control over print costs allows organisations to satisfy these sometimes incompatible demands. The larger and more dispersed the organisation, the greater the potential beneﬁts, but as Lexmark demonstrates at Suresnes, even small businesses can achieve signiﬁcant ﬁnancial and environmental savings by choosing to Print Less, Save More.