Green Office Blog

As with most companies this year, Green Office is under immense pressure to drive cost reductions while generating sales to ensure that we are sustainable and will be around next year! Luckily for us, our purpose is to make business more efficient and sustainable, and that is exactly what we’ve been doing for our own business and are planning on doing this year and beyond.

Green Office has been in operation since 1997, starting out in a garage with only three people. We are now a fully fledged Managed Service Business focusing on driving efficiencies and sustainability initiatives to ensure that our clients don’t have physical, financial and operational waste.

Green Office will be focusing on delivering services within the following four towers:

1. Managed Print Services looking at all aspects of a print environment.
2. Digitalisation Consulting, Services & Technology
3. Cyber Security, focusing on identifying and managing vulnerabilities
4. Sustainability Consulting, through assessments and training, amongst other items.

The expectation to deliver on an effective and efficient print environment for customers is becoming more and more important, whether it is a big corporate business with almost 3 000 assets to keep track of, or a small church down the road relying on one device to do the job. No matter your business size, you will most likely need to invest in a reliable partner to manage your devices and office automation space.

By investing in a partnership, you trust that the prices and terms presented to you are market-related and that the solution offering is a bargain because that is what the sales representative has told you…. right?

It is not unlikely that most businesses do not know the number of printed pages they are currently generating or what their entire print environment is costing them.  It takes a lot of time and industry experts to inventory all the devices, analyse the related cost to each device and understand the current picture of the business environment.  If done properly, a print audit can be extremely helpful, as this critical information is used to measure the success and to identify opportunities to revitalise your print environment, reduce costs and improve end-user productivity.

Everything we do each day involves a digital aspect, whether it be on a laptop, tablet, smartphone, e-reader or desktop computer.  Today’s youth see themselves as digital natives, the first generation to grow up surrounded by technology and actively engaging on devices every single day.

More and more schools are investing in classroom technologies, where students are now equipped with school-issued tablets and access to e-textbooks.  It is quickly becoming a necessity to convert textbooks to digital versions.  But we need to ask ourselves the question - does digital text really stand up to printed text?

• Digital text is portable, handy, less expensive (assuming you already have a device) and accessible (this only applies to metropolitan areas).
• When it comes to learning and our ability to process written information, digital text may seem like the obvious winner, however when considering that many people’s comprehension levels vary based on how they interact with text, the answer really depends on how interactive the digital text is.

Schools are trying to find ways of cutting down printing expenditure without having to compromise educational standards, so it is only natural that material resources are the first place to look when trying to save money.

Will the printer industry eventually die?

I think most people will answer the above question with an unequivocal “of course it will die”, and this answer is no doubt based on the rapidity at which digital accessibility is growing (not to mention how happy our youth are on their screens!).

Perhaps then the question should be “how quickly” will it die?

Print assessments have become somewhat of a standard in the Office Automation industry. It’s not uncommon for copier salesman to compare current spend to a new solution and advise on the savings available, should you sign on the dotted line.

The problem here is that the print estate is not looked at in its entirety. Only then will you see the current state compared to where you could be.

It is always important to optimally develop, manage and control vendor contracts, relationships and performance for the efficient delivery of contracted products and services.

Below are the reasons why clients don't let go:

When it comes to sustainable solution based offerings to businesses, the in-vogue term used in the print industry is “Managed Print Services (MPS)”. This term has come to be loosely used and not quite defined, causing confusion not only among decision makers in the consumer market but also within the industry suppliers themselves.

So, what is Managed Print Services?  It is not uncommon to hear of a business saying that they have an MPS Strategy in place and yet when one delves a bit deeper into the actual service in place, there are gaps found in the solution.

When conducting a Print Assessment, companies often do not start with a physical check of what they have. Instead they rely on their suppliers to provide them with information on devices for analysis.  The problem with this approach is that suppliers often don’t track their own information as accurately as one might think, which results in organizations making decisions based on flawed data sets.  Statistics show that most companies have at least double the devices they thought they had and that the vast majority of supplier provided data has significant discrepancies.