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AnonymousInactiveLexmark 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. -
AuthorApril 4, 2008 at 2:59 PM
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