Monitor Hard Copying

HP says service helps increase productivity

By Marianne Kolbasuk McGee

ver wondered how much time and money your users waste reloading paper in printers or waiting in line for the copy machine? Hewlett-Packard this week will announce a service aimed at analyzing the overall cost to users of hard-copy production and related activities.

The service, called HP FirstView and offered by resellers and integrators, aims at helping Fortune 1,000 customers identify ways to increase productivity and cut the costs associated with printers, faxes, copiers, and scanning equipment.

For instance, a reseller will track the use of networked hard-copy devices for a 30-day period, usi ng a data-collection software tool developed by HP, Promatek Industries, and Control Systems. The tool monitors who is making copies, who is printing, and who is sending faxes. The reseller will analyze the data and make recommendations-such as replacing personal printers with network printers-encourage users to send documents electronically, and provide analysis to end users that will help them decide whether or not to print documents.

The program is being managed by a new HP unit called Digital Hardcopy Services, which is part of HP's LaserJet Solutions Group in Palo Alto, Calif. Rather than sell the service directly, HP chose to have resellers and integrators offer them so that corporate users would not view it as an HP "presales pitch," says Richard Raimondi, general manager of the new HP service unit.

"The costs of operating printers, faxes, and copiers are skyrocketing, and the aim is to help customers get better control over that," Raimondi says. HP estimates that a business site with 1,000 em ployees typically spends about $3 million annually on hard-copy operations, supplies such as paper and toners, equipment acquisitions, maintenance, financing, and lost user productivity. Of that $3 million figure, approximately $2 million is associated with lost user productivity, including what Raimondi calls "walking-around time."

"A lot of time is spent by users walking documents back and forth from printers to copier machines-waiting for the pages to be printed, unjamming paper, and that sort of thing," Raimondi elaborates.

Dataquest analyst Bob Fennell says the service addresses a fast-growing problem. "There has been an avalanche of information in electronic form from which hard copies are produced," Fennell says. "And with printers, faxes, copiers, and information being more distributed, it's much harder to manage the costs and productivity associated with hard copies."

MetroHealth System, a health-care provider in Cleveland, participated in a FirstView pilot project earlier this year. "We were looking for some actual hard data of our hard-copy flow to quantify the existing condition and get improvements," says Dave Plevniak, director of IT and network operations at MetroHealth. Among the suggestions made were replacing older printer technologies with newer ones that could handle higher output volumes, he says. MetroHealth System is assessing how to use the results in its IT deployments. The company will review recommendations for printer and other technologies on a project-by-project basis, says Plevniak.

FirstView is priced at about $150 to $200 per user, according to HP executives. Likely candidates for the FirstView services include customers in paper-intensive industries, such as financial services and insurance.

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