LEXMARK WANTS USERS TO PRINT LESS

Toner News Mobile Forums Toner News Main Forums LEXMARK WANTS USERS TO PRINT LESS

Date: Friday April 4, 2008 02:59:57 pm
Viewing 1 post (of 1 total)
  • Author
    Posts

  • Anonymous
    Inactive

    Lexmark wants users to print less
    (FIRST THEY WANT YOU TO PRINT MORE,NOW THEY WANT YOU TO PRINT LESS,GOES TO SHOW THAT COMPANIES WILL SAY ANYTHING )
    Canadian subsidiary tells its channel to offer smarter print solutions rather than sell printers for little margin
    Lexmark
    wants to stop printed page growth. That’s the message from the lips of
    Matthew Barnicoat, national manager of professional services and
    solutions for Lexmark Canada Inc., based in Richmond Hill, Ont.The
    printer manufacturer wants instead to begin a cultural change where
    office workers move information faster, and print smarter.Printer
    prices have been dropping for the past 10 years, but printing has
    increased between eight and 12 per cent during that stretch of time,
    Barnicoat said.Lexmark is so serious about this that they’ve begun
    shipping printers with duplex defaults, which allows for double-sided
    printing, out of the box. Duplexing takes away 40 per cent of the
    global warming potential for every 1,000 pages printed, he said.

    According
    to Barnicoat, printing is the most uncontrolled part of a company’s
    budget. “They don’t have any means of controlling what they’re
    printing. They can set a benchmark to become 10 per cent cheaper, but
    unless they can change the way people work or put a solution in that
    does the job for them then they’ll still be moving paper,” he said.When
    people sit in a boardroom to view a PowerPoint presentation they’re
    almost always handed the slides on paper, a situation Barnicoat says
    occurs far too often and on where a change must take place.“The only
    reason why these slides are printed is because they can,” he added.This
    position shift sees Lexmark moving to offer industry specific solutions
    that are enterprise in class, but are also affordable to the SMB.
    Lexmark is targeting the healthcare, education and legal verticals with
    its line of industry-specific printers, starting at $4,300.

    The
    Lexmark Clinical Assistant, which includes all the functions of a
    Lexmark X646dte monochrome laser multifunction product, displays touch
    screen buttons such as order routing, scan, fax, email, and something
    called card copy, that prints both sides of a provincial health
    card.Lexmark’s Educations Stations will have touch screen buttons that
    can scan to classroom, print test and even mark multiple choice exams.
    These exams can be marked in two minutes for a class of 30, and can
    even provide students with analytics such as to how they fared against
    others, Barnicoat said.“This moves information faster for teachers so
    they can teach rather than do paper work,” he said.Lexmark’s legal
    devices (X646dte monochrome laser MFP) can scan to a network and to
    court. They will also come with the Copitrak system which helps lawyers
    bill for photocopies and prints.

    Lexmark offering industry specific print solutions
    All
    these models will have Lexmark’s embedded solutions framework (ESF)
    Java-based applets pre-installed on the printer, which enables users to
    route print jobs to PDF, e-mail, fax or be send to a data archive on
    hard disk.“The printer has a server,” Barnicoat said.With Lexmark’s
    line-up of industry-specific printers, users don’t have to buy a server
    for document feeding and routing. Barnicoat said this presents a cost,
    power and space savings for SMB customers.Another Lexmark feature is
    Zonal OCR, or optical character recognition, which can perform error
    checking on documents.As an example, when people sign mortgages they
    are often collected by the banks, put into a courier bag and shipped to
    a mortgage clearinghouse. It’s at the clearinghouse where errors are
    found.Barnicoat suggests that instead of shipping all those signed
    mortgages they could be scanned with Zonal OCR, and the system could
    indicate to the personal banker that a signature is missing. This would
    save time and paper, he said.These industry specific printers can also
    produce RFID tags for the legal market and for libraries. Currently,
    law offices are placing RFID readers in the ceiling to help their staff
    find files with RFID tags. Many libraries are placing RFID tags inside
    books as well, he said.Also, Lexmark’s Secure Release technology has
    enabled resellers to implement solutions such as RFID proximity cards.
    These cards prevent office workers from printing documents and leaving
    them at the printer. The Secure Release technology will print the
    document only when a user waves the RFID proximity card at the printer
    within a 12 hour time frame. After that, the print job gets deleted.One
    Fortune 500 company based in Toronto that Barnicoat could not name
    found they had more than one million pages that were not collected in
    the past year. With this new solution, this company was able to reduce
    its print costs by 28 per cent.“The page you don’t print is the
    cheapest cost per page,” Barnicoat said.Channel partners still selling
    hardware should move to sell these types of solutions because of the
    ongoing price drop in the printer market. These industry specific
    solutions enable resellers to provide more value by selling business
    intelligence, he said.

    Barnicoat believes that if resellers
    provide this kind of consulting customers will source the products
    through them, rather than another place that just sells on price. It
    will also lead to higher double digit margins, he believes. Currently
    standard printer margins are in the single digits.A recent Lexmark
    survey found that, over the lifecycle of a printer, 76 per cent of your
    consumables spend is on paper, while only seven per cent is toner
    cartridges. Paper consumption currently leads to 86 per cent of the
    global warming potential, which includes the entire carbon footprint,
    the logistics of making the paper, pulp, cutting the tree, chlorinating
    the paper and running the paper mill.“We want the end users to print
    smarter and move information faster,” he said.

Viewing 1 post (of 1 total)
  • You must be logged in to reply to this topic.