About that paperless office … According to Hewlett-Packard, studies by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency show that the average American office worker uses 10,000 sheets of paper a year.
HP also maintains that some Fortune 500 companies could use up to 800 tons less paper a year — saving themselves $77 million — by using both sides of the paper in copiers or printers, also known as duplex printing.
There might be a little marketing hype in those figures, but it is obvious to many office workers that there is indeed a lot of printing and copying going on. The printer-copier industry maintains that many companies, in fact, don’t know how much copying and printing they are doing.
“If you ask a CFO what does it cost them when they hit file-print, they have no idea,” said Bill Orr, vice president of sales at Michigan Office Solutions.
Printers “pop up like mushrooms”‘ in many organizations he said. In many cases, the cost of an office printer is under $500, “so it’s just a departmental expense to go out and buy one.”
“There’s no strategy,” said Orr, which makes the investment in printers at some companies “kind of a run-away cost — one of the largest un-audited expenses in corporate America.”
Because the individual expenditures are low, “they fly under the radar,” he added. “It’s kind of out of control.”
Tom Senecal, owner of Laser’s Resource in Kentwood, said Gartner and IDC, two major research firms that study the information technology industry and its markets, have compiled evidence supporting the industry’s claim that printers are “the last bastion of un-audited corporate costs.”
“Most corporations in America look under every rock for cost savings,” noted Senecal. “When we go talk to most corporations, we ask how many printers do you have? Nine out of 10 can’t tell us the answer…