Audit your organization’s printers to determine how much is being spent to print documents

By Richard Griffin

Toner Yields

MFP and printer manufacturers express cartridge yields at a standard amount of coverage—5 percent per color is normal, although I've seen some use 4 percent or 6 percent coverage. That works out to 5 percent for a typical black print, with 20 percent being the measure for color, as each of the four color cartridges yields their 5 percent.

This practice makes sense; the more image you have to print, the more toner it takes to print it. However, it makes it tough to calculate your costs because you must know, or at least be able to closely estimate, the coverage of the documents your organization prints to estimate what you're paying for printing.

In my case, I was lucky: our devices make coverage amounts available once prints are made, and that information is available on our JetAdmin software. We had over 13.1 million black prints logged to come up with an average coverage amount of 4.77 percent. Color devices are much more recent to my college, and due to the tightened economy and the higher cost of color we had only about 315,000 color prints to calculate our coverage, which came out 14.00 percent. Despite the smaller sampling, however, we are confident that number is representative of color documents our customers print.

The bottom line is that if you have access to the coverage numbers of documents produced by your organization, use them. However, if you don't, it should be O.K. to use the 5 percent per color standard. In our experience, the resulting costs should then err on the conservative side.

As you hang up the phone, you're engrossed in thought. This offer from a potential vendor, like similar ones before it, was tempting: they'd like to audit all the printers and MFPs in your organization to give you the picture of what you're really spending for printing. Of course, they'll do all this work for free, and of course, they'll make recommendations that will save your organization some serious cash.

You'd really like to know just how much you're spending on print, especially with all those little desktop devices. If you could make some recommendations that would save your organization money—and back up those recommendations with some cold hard facts—that would certainly add to the value that you and your unit provide while making your unit's position a little more secure.

But offers from vendors present issues. They're willing to do this for nothing because those recommendations they're going to make will involve the purchase of some of their new machines. Also, do you really want strangers from a strange organization getting such an intimate look at how your organization operates? And really, how unbiased can an audit be from a firm that wants to use that audit to sell you machines? Don't many of these same companies offer facilities management (FM) services that could put your unit out of work?

You know you could avoid those problems and others like them if you hired someone to do an audit of your printers. There are several capable firms that specialize in that type of work. But that kind of service isn't cheap, and you just don't have the budget to justify something like that right now.

Do it Yourself

Fortunately, there is a third option: you can perform the audit yourself. "Now, wait a minute, Griffin," you might say. "We've got over 200 (500? 1,000?) devices we'd need to evaluate, and I don't have the time or the staff to do all that. And how do we audit a bunch of printers anyway?"

I won't lie: auditing a fleet of printers and MFPs properly is more than a bit of work—but not as much as you might think. Odds are your fleet of many, many printers consists of a much more limited number of models, and once you've calculated the total cost of ownership for one model you can apply that to every example of that model you own.

Also, you probably have print management software that gives you much of the information you need. And think of the payoff: it really is conceivable that your recommendations could halve the cost of printing in your organization. What a powerful message to carry to your superiors.

How to do it

This is how it's done if you own the devices:

Step 1. Inventory your fleet. Most organizations have network software where all network printers are listed (we use HP's JetAdmin). But to find all the printers, especially the little inkjets sitting on people's desks that are hooked up to only one computer, you must still walk around and take notes. Those little printers are the costliest ones, so I recommend you take that walk.

Step 2. Determine the consumables each printer requires and their prices—including tax and shipping. This, of course, includes toner, but may also include drums, imaging units, waste cartridges, developers, fusers, transfer kits and more. If you have more than 100 devices (and just about everyone does), that task seems daunting. It's not as bad as you might think, though. As noted earlier, many of the devices will be the same make and model, reducing the number of machines you need data for.

Also, you'll be able to find what you need to know about consumables on the Internet. I'll give a shout out here to Xerox: go to their Web site and type into their search engine the model you want information on along with the words "toner" and yield." Taking the first choice in the subsequent listing gets you a page with all the relevant information you'll need. In my experience, though, you are more often just going to have to Google it, and most of the information will come from Web sites of dealers of the various machines. For some reason I get a lot of info from dealers in the U.K. Perhaps they are more forthcoming than we are. In any event, that British information works just as well as ours.

Step 3. Determine the yield and cost per sheet of the consumables (but skip this if you have a click rate plan that includes consumables). How many sheets can you print before a consumable must be replaced? Toner life depends upon the coverage of the documents being printed. (See the sidebar about toner yields and why we use the 5 percent standard that manufacturers specify.)

Now, some manufacturers make getting this info easier.

• Konica Minolta has many toner yields on this page: kmbs.konica–minolta.us/productsattachments/TonerYields.pdf

• Ricoh's Web site tends to have information on the "Accessories" page of its individual models.

• HP usually has toner info on the Web page for the consumable itself.

In many cases, though, you will once again have to Google it. Once you get that information, crunch the numbers along with the info gleaned in step two to come up with a cost per sheet for consumables.

Doing the Math

Here's an example of how to do that for an HP 4730 (we have 16 of them in our fleet). Each black toner costs $156, and each color toner costs $356 including shipping and tax. Each toner has a yield of 12,000 pages at 5 percent coverage. To calculate the toner costs for a black print, divide the cost of the toner cartridge by the number of sheets it will print: $156/12,000. The resulting answer of .013 means that cost is 1.3 cents per black print.

For color there's a bit more work. Divide the toner cost by the number of pages as you did for black: $356/12,000. The result is .0297, about 3 cents each. Now, two additional steps:

1) Multiply that .0297 by 3, because you have three color toners (cyan, magenta and yellow).

2) Add the cost of black to that, since, as you know, it takes all four colors to make a color print. So, .0297 x 3 + 1.3 = 10.21, about 10.2 cents in toner for one color print.

Our 4730 also requires an image transfer kit and fuser. The transfer kit is $215 and lasts 100,000 pages; the fuser is $270 and also lasts 100,000 pages. Here's the math for the fuser and transfer kit, respectively: $270/100,000 = $0.0027, about 1/4 cent per page, and $215/100,000 = $0.00215, about 1/5 cent per page.

Add the costs of the toner, transfer kit and fuser together and you come up with .10685, about 10.7 cents per color print. That is the total cost of consumables per color print for an HP 4730. To calculate the consumables-only cost of a black print, subtract the cost of the three color toners to come up with $0.01785, about 1.8 cents each, which is the total consumables cost per black print for an HP 4730.

By the way, while I was able to get toner yield information on HP's Web site, they offered nothing about the yields for the transfer kit and fuser. I Googled it and got that info from a place called the Toner N More Superstore. You gotta go where you gotta go…

Step 4. Amortize the cost of the device. We go from two years for the cheapo desktop inkjet up to six years for the departmental behemoth. Straight line depreciation works here. In the case of my HP 4730, we paid $5,464 for it and anticipate we'll use it for five years. Divide the cost by expected life: $5,464/5=$1092.80, the annual cost of owning this device.

Step 5. Determine the device's annual output. There are different ways to get that:

a) Use your network software.

b) Print a usage sheet straight from the device.

c) Type the device's IP address into a browser.

However, for the small desktop devices, none of these tactics may work, and you may have to make a wild educated guess. When I must do that, I use half of the manufacturer's recommended usage range. The HP 4730 I'm using for this example produces 24,273 black prints and 16,897 color prints annually, for a total of 41,170.

Step 6. Determine your annual cost of consumables. Do that by multiplying the per print cost of consumables by the number of prints produced annually. For our 4730: 24,273 black prints x $0.01785 each = $433.27 annually for black printing and 16,897 color prints x .1021 each = $1725.18 annually for color.

Step 7. Factor in the cost of service plans, if any. If you have a click rate plan that includes consumables, here is where that cost is calculated. For a 4730 our service plan includes no consumables; we pay $273 annually.

Step 8. Add it all up. For every machine add: (annual consumables cost or click rate) + (annual device cost) + (annual cost of service plans, if any) and bingo: there is your annual total cost of operation. For our HP 4730, here are the numbers:

Black consumables: $433.27
+ Color consumables: $1,725.18
+ Annual device cost: $1,092.80
+ Service plan: $ 273.00
______________________________
Total: $3,524.25

This is the annual cost of operating one HP 4730 in our fleet.

Cost per print

Want to know your actual cost per print? Add together your annual device cost and service plan cost. Divide that by the total number of prints produced. You now have your device and service plan cost per sheet. Add the per-print cost of all non-toner consumables to that number. Now you have all the non color specific costs per print. Finally, add the black toner cost to the black prints and color toner costs to color prints to get your final cost per print.

For our HP 4730:

1) Total of annual device and service plan cost: $1,092.80 + $273 = $1,365.80

2) Device and service plan cost per print: $1,365.80 / 41,170 = $0.0332

3) Non-toner consumables: $0.0027 + $0.00215 = $0.00485

4) Total cost per print without toner: $0.0332 + $0.00485 = $0.03805

5) Final cost per black print: $0.03805 + $0.013 (black toner) = $0.05105

6) Final cost per color print: $0.03805 + $0.1021 (color toner) = $0.14035

The final costs per print on our HP 4730 are a whisker over 5 cents each for black and 14 cents each for color.

If you lease your devices:

Use your annual lease cost instead of the amortized device cost. Any additional and/or one-time lease costs (like the cost of returning a device at the end of a lease) should be counted in the year they occur because it is too hard to otherwise come up with hard numbers that can be amortized. Also, leases almost always employ a click rate so you would use that number in evaluating consumables and/or service cost.

If you have any questions about any of this, call or e-mail me and I'll be glad to help.