Wednesday, June 3, 2009

The Printer Saga: To replace or not to replace

Our colour laser printer is broken. The current printer is a lexmark laser printer, but the firm also has a range of Nicoh printers which are outsourced and whose cost is based on a one off up front cost and a price per page printed.

The current LexMark is terminally ill and needs replacing. The question now is what to replace it with - another lexmark or a Ricoh. Today I assisted the IT department in developing a three year TCO model for each printer. It was surprisingly complex and involved taken into account all sorts of costs such as the initial purchase or upgrade cost of the printers, what kinds of documents are printed on the printer (different types of document have different coverages and therfore ink usage), cost per page (quite difficult to determine for the lexmark) etc. I produced a pretty simple model to compare the TCOs but had to make all sorts of assumptions and exclusions which may ultimately be wrong and mean we could make the wrong decision.

No comments:

Post a Comment