My profession (as a Public Relations consultant) helps me get insights into a lot of areas in the respective industries/areas of operation of my clients... and some that many would otherwise overlook. On the eve of the Earth Day, I am taking the liberty of one such insight into HP's initiatives towards "Green" IT, if I may use the term.
'Printing' hasn’t been an area that was an obvious place to go and look for a "Green" proposition for most companies. They may have worked on their data centers or their servers or their PCs… but traditionally with most companies, printing and output management hasn’t received as much attention in terms of looking at it strategically to not only enhance their green programmes, but also to reap substantial financial benefits (as cost savings /reduction in energy consumption) along the way.
Let's look at these facts:
- "Most companies could reduce their printing costs by 10–30%" : Gartner
- "Companies spend 1–3% of revenue per year on output fleet management": Gartner
- The average worker makes 19 copies of every document
- The average worker loses 1 of every 20 documents
- The average worker spends 150 hours/year seeking incorrectly filed documents
- The average annual document costs are about 5–11% of an enterprise’s revenue": IDC
HP Imaging & Printing Group recently launched a theme which they call “When Everything Counts”. In the current economic environment, when companies are under tremendous pressure looking at ways to bring down their cost, but definitely without a trade-off with the capabilities, the Imaging & Printing infrastructure, which unfortunately often gets sidelined as an Admin Function rather than hardcore IT, offers a strong opportunity to improving their own processes and help them bring down costs.
HP is focusing on the printing environment for its customers and evaluating how can they optimize that. HP believes that there is a huge opportunity to not only save costs but to go greener in time. The better part of the story is that most of the solutions that solve the cost problem also help the green initiative. So companies don’t have to trade one off for the other.
Well, but who would invest in a recessionary environment? This is the best part of the story: You dont have to invest to start with.
Some of the examples can be done without buying anything. If a company isn’t managing
Duplex Printing, HP doesn’t charging you anything to turn on the Duplex capability in your existing HP printer. If Duplex Printing means using 800 tonnes less paper annually
for HP, saving the company more than $7 million per year, the decision to go for this at a company-wide level for any business definitely isn't difficult.
You can also access a host of interesting features - available for free on HP
website:
- The HP Carbon Footprint Calculator allows you to estimate printer energy consumption, paper usage, conslidation of devices, therby bringing down the carbon impact of usage and the equivalent monetary costs. Have you compared the carbon footprint of your existing printer to find out if any alternative solution can match the cost benefits in terms of the energy consumption and the carbon footprint?
- And if you do have an obsolete printer that consumes more energy and brings down productivity among certain others that aer more efficient, how do you monitor and ensure more pages are printed on the more efficient printers rather than the energy-hungry ones. This is just one of the several benefits of the HP Webjet Admin - available for download free of cost.
If you do a lot of printing off the web-pages, you would probably be wasting a lot more pages with a normal print - along with the sidebars and other irrelevant content such as banner ads, et al. The HP Smart Web Printing tool is a good option
Also check out the
top tips from HP for efficient energy savings. Mike Feldman, VP - IPG Global Enterprise Business blogged about his views on "
Eco:nomics" - helping the environment and your bottomline.
What's your resolution for a Greener Year ahead?
