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Hi everyone,

I made up this thing. hopefully it is useful to people

You enter the cost of the printers, and for the off the shelf printer, the cost of the cartridges and amount of pages per cartridge. and for managed, you enter the click charge cost and asset fee. then how many monthly pages, and the estimated growth in monthly page count, per year. It spits out the aggregate cost of owning the unit after 1-5 years.

Enjoy!

printer_cost_analysis.xlsx (12.4 KB)

@HP @Dell_Technologies

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I admire the work done, but would point out that you leave a couple of important factors unaccounted for. Namely, toner is not the only cost associated with a printer. There are drum units, transfer belts, fusers, all of which can fail and would be covered for a managed device but not a purchased device. One service call will immediately negate any savings. And it is not always all about money. Many of our clients like the fact that someone else is taking care of things, making sure toner supplies are there, cleaning the glass when the adf gets streaks on it. And should the machine fail completely, you instead of the provider is stuck replacing it.

For the extremely low page counts that you used in the example, likely you could make a case of run till it drops and then replace. For us, a machine of that volume would only be included in a contract that contained more machines with a much higher cumulative monthly page volume. As a one off unit, we would offer an HP SMP contract which guarantees the cost of supplies but has no other commitment attached.

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This is very nice and I do appreciate that you are sharing it…

But as said above, there are too many factors lacking …especially taking that MFDs usually have contracts for 60 months.

  1. Inkjet Printers
    • Ink costs
    • Warranty costs (to extend to 5 years or based on 3 years with replacement)
    • Monthly average print costs
    • Ink wastage (if print counts do not hit # of pages after 3 months and ink dries up)
  2. Laser Printers

    • Toner costs

    • Warranty costs (to extend to 5 years or based on 3 years with replacement)

    • Operational costs (fusers, belts)

  3. Managed MFDs (Copiers)
    • Copy/print charges per page
    • Secure print feature charges (a.k.a. “follow me printing”)
    • Monthly “rental” or lease charges
    • Charges if to extend beyond 60 months or “buy in”
    • Print server charges (if required), Windows Server, SQL licensing etc
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Basically …the idea is nobody replaces a printer with a MFD, but would replace a fleet printers of for a number of users with MFDs.

Like for 20 users with 10 printers, to consider replacing with 2 MFDs

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Nice tool - I’ve made similar in the past.

I’ve never gone so far as to create a generalised tool, because there are many factors which can be tricky to properly cost such as warranties, cost of downtime, cost savings of a faster printer (ever tried to work out how much staff cost would be saved by getting 60ppm rather than 30?)

One factor which came up a few years ago was a feature of the Xerox ColorQube range (now sadly discontinued) where impressions with a small amount of colour were charged at the black & white rate. For some clients, this meant a huge saving in colour print costs and removing the need to have 10 different types of letterhead and a load of paper trays.

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HP Manged Pagewide products offer a similar billing ability, but it is up to the provider whether they actually turn that ability on or not. I also note that you would be one of the first people I have heard use the word sadly in conjunction with the death of the ColorQube. Most offices we run into are glad to have the kindergarten smell of crayons out of the office. Plus woe be upon you if the power gets cut and the unit has not shut down properly. Ran into a couple of those printers with the drum unit fused inside the printer.

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