Fragmented Purchase and Profit & Loss Responsibility

In most corporations the hardcopy infrastructure (the printers, copiers, fax machines and
scanners) has, until recent years, been an area of the organization that has not received a lot of
focus. This is truer for the printer infrastructure than for the copier infrastructure. There are
several reasons that Chief Information Officers offer to explain this condition, the most common
being that the printers are inexpensive and they work, so in the grand scheme of things it’s just
not that critical an area to focus on.
This had been the prevailing attitude until Information technology (I/T) managers were forced to
look outside of the data center for other areas to generate cost savings. As manager began
conducting assessments of their Document-Related Information Supply Chain (DISC) and
hardcopy infrastructures, they consistently found the following conditions to be true:

•  The waste and high-costs were worse than they had imagined
•  Overall device and cost information were unknown to them
•  There was a high concentration of devices per user, leading to excess capacity
•  The devices were old and inefficient
•  Devices were purchased without regard for a deployment strategy
•  Similar devices and supplies were being purchased separately by I/T, Facilities & Operations (including Purchasing), and end-user departments
•  There was an opportunity to significantly reduce costs and save money