Consumables Monitoring, Management and Fulfillment Services

• Upon receipt of the toner, it can be stored for a short time at your location until a second Toner Alert can be generated notifying the end user that their printer has reached a 5% toner left status. This second Toner Alert is unique to the industry and it maximizes the amount of toner used up in each cartridge. In other toner fulfillment processes/solutions, end users tend to swap out the toner cartridge when they receive a new one. This results in unused toner being sent back to the toner supplier (Toner that you already paid for!)
• Protection against unnecessary shipping charges for emergency shipments
• Reduction to almost zero dollars and space tied up in on-site storage of toner
• Elimination of excessive orders

Because our tools were designed from the ground up to promote increased data transparency having no surprises and flexibility, we can provide Customers with virtually any data about their networked fleet of devices that will allow us together to make “data driven” decisions on the current fleet of printers installed at your Site(s).Through the use of our Consumables management and monitoring toolset, we are able to capture and manage the supply chain events and logistics to enable the most efficient and secure
process for monitoring, toner low notifications, ordering and fulfillment to Site or Device.

Challenges without remote monitoring
In a typical customer environment, both user and help desk productivity is impacted significantly by supplies running out or device malfunction.

• Supplies depletion: Supplies inventory is manuallymonitored. If no toner/ink supplies are in stock, then the service organization would need to be notified, and print jobs would need to be redirected to another device if available. The manual intervention required often means that resources are being diverted from other tasks.
• Device failure/malfunction: If an output device stops printing due to a malfunction, users would have to work on an alternative device, impacting print queues and device utilization.
• Meter reading - without remote monitoring, this is a manual process which needs to be conducted at regular intervals. If meter readings are missed, estimates need to be used

Our tools for toner level monitoring are some of the most robust and flexible in the industry. The toolset will monitor device alerts, usage and other metrics to be used for determining utilization, run rate volumes, consumable coverage and asset lifecycle management. This toolset has the ability to customize reports, alerts, and capabilities to enhance the Customer environment. Immediate cost savings and operational improvement via proactive consumables management will occur. The software toolset will capture toner alerts and based on the threshold set in the tool for replacement, consumables will be ordered and shipped to each customer location. Automated email confirming shipment shall be enabled via the NOC service coordinators using the service desk software.

Consumable Costs
Consumable costs consist of all the elements required to put ink or toner on paper. Unfortunately, the print and the copier sectors have completely different approaches to this - copier companies bundle in the toner and maintenance costs into a cost per page fee, while the printer industry supplies toner separately on a cost per cartridge basis. A key point is that printer cartridges contain engine components as well as toner; therefore when a printer cartridge is replaced, there is more to the replacement than toner, which explains the greater reliability but also the higher cost.

These two different approaches have made it very difficult for anyone undertaking a review in-house to compare the cost of printers with copiers or multifunctional devices. In order to make a proper comparison between output devices (printers, copiers, fax machines and multifunctional devices) the cartridge costs have to be converted into a cost per page –this requires an understanding of the murky world of toner cartridge page yields. A sophisticated print assessment will have the tools and means to make this calculation or substantiate any assumption made; a poor one will simply assume a low page yield. The importance of understanding how much toner is printed on each page and therefore how many pages each printer cartridge will cover cannot be over-stated. Consumable costs represent the majority of the cost in a typical output device and inflating this element will have a significant effect on the overall cost calculation.

We regularly come across print reviews where all mono printing is assumed at “8% toner coverage per page” (which means a lower yield per cartridge) or that the running cost of a Hewlett-Packard color printer is simply “12 cents per page”. These are dangerous assumptions and often occur in a ‘free’ print review where the provider or in-house person doesn’t want to spend the time to do a thorough analysis. For many Customers where a GES assessment has been performed, a print review revealed an average of 5.2% toner coverage for mono printing across the whole site. At the departmental level the spread was between 2.9% at the lowest and 11.8% at the highest. As a further quality assurance step, GESsupplements its electronic toner coverage analysis with sample documents, from which we determine the actual coverage.

GES offers toner monitoring solutions with OEM toner as well as non-OEM toner for those customers wishing to utilize it. Our supply chain allows us to source OEM toners at the best prices available and for those customers who are looking to save even more, we offer the Print Master brand of compatible toner cartridges.

• Average Cost of a Black Toner cartridge is $200
• Average. cost of a Color Toner cartridge is $275 each(CYM).
• Toner inventory held onsite at an average of 2 cartridges per printer ~ $400+ & risk of loss & becoming obsolete!
• Multiple printer models = ordering complexity
• Early changing of toner at “Toner Low” alert leaves 15%+ in the cartridge, wasting $25-$35 per cartridge.
• Order fulfillment costs about $15-$40 per transaction

Solution Summary
GES’s role as an IT provider uniquely positions us to unlock a customer’s full output cost savings potential. Our managed print programs proactively address issues even before the end user may experience a problem improving customer productivity while reducing overall output costs. The cheapest page is the one not printed and GES is differentiated from stand alone print providers in our capacity to extract maximal cost improvement. GES does not need to focus on driving pages to proprietary devices to create consumables profit. Converting a page to digitized content implies emphasis on networking, servers, storage and security that are in GES’s expertise and standalone print providers are challenged to match. GES’s print solutions consider and address cost implications across the entire IT context including service desk, image management, servers, storage and other IT considerations standalone print providers miss when optimizing device level implications at the end of the wire.

The ultimate toner saving solution isone that minimizes overall pages printed through enhanced workflow or page reduction strategies.Enhanced visibility into service data can also be used to tailor service contracts to reflect proactive service delivery. And by gaining an insight into usage trends within a customer environment, GES can use this data to recommend product refreshes or other products or services to their customers. Remote monitoring improves our ability to support customers and uncover new cost reduction ideas. In the long term, to maximize the benefits of proactive supplies management, remote services platforms like GES’s offer integration with both the supplies vendor’s and customer’s procurement systems to streamline the ordering and delivery of supplies.ere`s what you can expect: Validation of all orders: part numbers, contract terms and agreement compliance by our supplies managers.