Costs

 

Analysing costs of your device.

Understanding the true cost of print from an device is one of the mos complex issues to deal with. The reason being is how many costs do you attribute to running that device. The Print Strategy Project carried out extensive analysis of the university fleet, machine by machine and also investigated independent research to understand what they were including and excluding. All the various attributes were identified and a consensus on what costs should be attributed to the devices was agreed.

  • The cost of buying (or leasing) the machine and running it
  • How long the device is expected to be in use (as recommended by the supplier)
  • Volume of print over a month, and a year
    • Mono to Colour print volume split
  • Cost inks and toners
    • Cost to buy cartridges and toner bottles
    • How many pages each toner bottle
    • The number of toners needed to produce the expected volumes
    • Cost of buying maintenance kits
    • The number of maintenance kits a device will use to produce the volumes
    • The cost of maintenance kits
  • Cost of energy
    • The amount of energy the device uses to print the volume (assuming it is switched off between prints, which most aren't)
    • The cost the energy used to print the volume
  • Paper cost
    • The average volume printed on duplex (roughly 1/4)
    • The number of sheets used to produce the volume of print
    • The cost of paper used to produce volume of print
  • Staff costs
    • FLS costs to install, configure and support the device throughout its life
    • Staff costs of time for loading
    • ITS overhead (Central ITS overheads, FLS, PSS)

    Once all these costs are understood they can be broken down to create a per page cost using the volume data. To complicate this calculation further all users print in different ways so one person may overuse another may underuse and these all need to be accomodated.

Establishing all these costs is very very difficult but PSS has established that broadly it costs 10 times more to run an Ink printer than a laser printer (some cost over £1.00 per page). Larger network printers are far more economic than local desktop network printers and that currently MFPs are the most economic way to print at 4p per mono page and 12p per colour page.