We are pleased to announce our managed print solution which we are happy to bring to our customers – both existing and new – via a collaboration with copiersandprinters.co.uk. Here we’ll explain the differences between the traditional ‘Toner Out’ way of printing and a managed printer solution…

What Is a ‘Toner Out‘ Device? This is where a company purchases a printing device and then purchases the replacement toners and consumables as and when required from wherever they like as they are not contracted to a supplier. More often than not it’s smaller desktop printers and multifunctional devices that are run this way. Toner out devices are typically cheaper to purchase initially, come with a 12 month manufacturer’s warranty and a set of ‘starter toners’.

What Is a Managed Print Solution? This solution is similar in that initially the customer purchases the printing equipment by lease, outright purchase or on our 0% payment plan. However, that’s where the similarities end.  In order to run and maintain the device a ‘Cost Per Page’ charge is agreed for both mono and colour prints. You sign up to a short term ‘Service and Maintenance Agreement’ and the then pay quarterly, in arrears, for the pages you have printed during the preceding 3 months. The agreement covers all parts, consumables, toner, call outs and support. In short, everything other than the paper used to print on and the electricity used to run the device. The majority of these devices report meter readings and order their own consumables automatically. When you have an issue or require support for the device, you simply call the support line and a locally based engineer will be on hand to help solve the issue.

Why are we suggesting that you consider a managed print solution? Surely you are in a better position being able to go to market for consumables and find them at the cheapest price rather than be contracted to something?

Total Cost Of Ownership Online retailers load their ‘Toner Out’ products with razer thin margins to stay competitive and at first glance these products often look a more cost effective solution. That is until you begin to calculate what the device will cost to run over the period you will keep the machine – the total cost of ownership. This is frequently overlooked by businesses looking for a desktop product and not factored in to their buying decision. Companies often don’t appreciate that there is ‘cost per page’ when in fact there is, and it’s simple to calculate. We are often approached by customers wanting desktop printers and multifunctional devices as pretty much every workplace in the UK uses them. Here is a typical example of a customer of our partner copiersandprinters.co.uk who had no idea just how expensive their HP Desktop Printer was to run.

This is the HP 150nw Colour Laser Printer – and at just £153.00 (ex VAT) it seems a reasonably priced printer. When copiersandprinters.co.uk initially spoke with the customer it was explained that they were spending a lot on toner and their average monthly print volume was 600 colour and 1,100 mono prints. Our partner went away and calculated, based on the price of consumables the customer had provided, just how much the HP device was currently costing to run. As you can see from the table below, this is quite straightforward to calculate – by taking the cost of the toner and then dividing it by the number of prints each cartridge gives you. For example, with this device Black Toner costs £46.84 and produces 1,000 pages. £46.84 ÷ 1,000 = 4.68p. Then add in other consumable items used to produce a black print, in this case an ‘Imaging Drum’ (£89.53 ÷ 16,000 pages) and a ‘Toner Collection Unit’ (£14.95 ÷ 7,000 pages)

It was quite straightforward to calculate that each mono print was costing 5.45p and each colour print was costing 25.75p which, compared to the running costs of a device offered by copiersandprinters.co.uk, is truly extortionate! However, there’s another thing to factor in – page yields. This is how many prints a customer would expect to get from each cartridge. For example HP states that you would get 1,000 prints from one of their Black Toner Cartridges. Manufacturer’s calculate ‘page yields’ by assuming each printed page has a covering of just 5% of an A4 page – which is highly unrealistic. So if a customer is printing anything even remotely graphical, or with lots of text they won’t receive the claimed yield, and the cost per print then goes up. The image below demonstrates more realistic page coverage, and what they would cost to print on this particular HP Printer.

Now the running costs are starting to look outrageous on what looked at first glance like a cheap and cheerful printer. We fully appreciate that cost justification is crucial when trying to convince a company with historic use of a toner out device to consider a managed print solution, mainly because the hardware supplied is considerably more expensive to purchase than something you’d buy from an online seller.

In this case, the customer wanted a multifunctional device, rather than a print only device such as the HP they were running. The Toshiba 330ac was proposed at a cost of £1,500.00 which is nearly 10 times the cost of the device they originally had. Even though this is a superior device with more functionality, we fully recognise that 10 times the purchase price seems ridiculous. So, now it’s time for the justification. The running costs of the proposed Toshiba device were 1p per page for a mono print, and 6p per page for a colour print. Based on the customer’s print volume (600 colour and 1,100 mono prints per month) it was calculated their yearly expenditure on print consumables was £2,574.69 on the HP device. With the Toshiba device, their annual bill with copiersandprinters.co.uk would amount to £564.00. Looking at that over 5 years, which is roughly how long you would expect a customer to keep this type of machine. HP 150nw = £12,873.48 Toshiba 330ac = £2,820.00 That’s a saving of £10,053.48 over 5 years. Yes, you’ve read that right. Remember, that’s based on a customer covering just 5% of each print in toner, so the savings will actually be even bigger over that period when you factor in realistic page coverage. With the device benefits from ‘Unlimited Toner Coverage’, meaning whether the customer covers the page in toner or simply prints off one line of text, they’ll pay the same cost per page. Suddenly that £153.00 for the HP device doesn’t look so cheap and we’ve effectively justified why this solution is by far the better purchase in the long run as the customer’s savings in the first year alone will cover the costs of the new hardware! We call it a no brainer, so did the customer.

In this example the customer was changing from a ‘Toner Out’ scenario to a managed printing solution but at the quoted charges including the upfront cost of the equipment and the 1p/6p charge per page printed, many companies who are already using a managed print service would also benefit.   Please get in contact with us if you would like to discuss the options highlighted here further.

We look forward to hearing from you soon!