In-house color: Big expense or bigger opportunity?

The latest generation of printers and multifunction devices makes in-house, on-demand color the economical — and safe — choice for important communications

Published April 4, 2014  Alan Joch for Output Management

Color is king when it comes to communication and comprehension — just look at the numbers. Industry research shows that color improves information recall by up to 60 percent compared to monochrome output and raises brand awareness by 70 percent. But there’s a rub — using commercial print shops to produce brochures, reports, marketing collateral and signage may come with hidden costs and other significant risks.

Nevertheless, some enterprise managers remain overly cautious about broadly deploying color standalone and multifunction products (MFPs) in their organizations. The fear: Unmanaged costs will dilute the return on investments for in-house, on-demand color.

Fortunately, enterprise managers have new options for taking control of in-house color resources and closely managing expenses. Combine this with a steady decline in hardware costs, and today’s best color devices deliver a host of business benefits that make in-house color the communications choice for a growing number of enterprises. The keys are understanding the business case for this strategy and then identifying best-in-class color printers and MFPs that can deliver the highest returns.

Positive returns

The business case for in-house starts with a comparison of total cost of ownership for in-house color versus commercially printed materials. Factors to consider include the downward trend in prices for color printers and MFPs, which continue to decrease with each new generation. Also factor in hidden costs associated with commercial print jobs. To receive volume discounts, customers typically must purchase a minimum print run, which is practical primarily for high-volume jobs. However, most general-business and marketing collateral items require smaller volumes, which means enterprises may pay for more than they need if the work goes to an outside vendor. Unnecessary charges can quickly balloon actual costs and distort the value of per-page rates that initially look attractive. With in-house color, enterprises print only what they need and avoid excess fees.

Color MFPs provide another financial advantage. They reduce the need for separate monochrome printers, scanners, copiers and fax machines, which, in turn, reduces capital investments for hardware and operating expenses for service and maintenance of multiple devices.

Commercial printing comes with risks

Cost isn’t the only consideration with color printing. Enterprise managers must also investigate the business and legal risks associated with stockpiling printed materials resulting from large commercial print runs. For example, regulatory issues arise if a bank employee inadvertently distributes out-of-date loan-rate information by grabbing an old brochure from a storeroom. Enterprises mitigate this risk by printing collateral on-demand and in limited quantities. The cloud further assures accurate content. Whether in a private, public or hybrid cloud configuration, enterprise administrators can store the latest information in a central location that’s easy to keep up to date. When a loan officer at branch bank needs a brochure for a client, he or she downloads the current information from the cloud, confident that everything is accurate.

Decisions about in-house and commercial color also hinge on which option best supports the fast pace of today’s business activities. Lead times from commercial printers may be too long to accommodate the latest promotions or trade shows. Materials also may contain errors and require time and effort to route them to the right department when they arrive on the loading dock.

The bottom line: To accurately compare the effectiveness of in-house color and print-shop rates, look beyond high-level per-page estimates to detailed and realistic TCO analyses and other practical considerations.

Best-in-class technology

There’s a lot for enterprise managers to like about in-house, on-demand color printing. But to achieve a full return on their investments, administrators need printers and MFPs that take advantage of the latest innovations. State-of-the-art controls top the list. To help managers enforce policies about who is authorized to print in color, the devices should offer the ability to assign authorizations by department, job title, application or file type. In addition, managers should have the option of imposing time-of-day restrictions. The marketing staff, for example, may access color resources during normal business hours, but not after hours, which eliminates the risk of the devices being used for photos or other personal content. Output quotas are another effective control – each department may be allocated a set number of color pages to print each month, but once the limit is reached, devices produce only black-and-white output.

For added oversight, managers should choose solutions with tools for monitoring color output by workgroup, department or division to track usage volumes and gather chargeback data, if relevant.

To keep this wide range of controls from becoming overly complex to manage, the best solutions support administrative control from a central server that enables managers to push corporate policies uniformly to devices throughout the enterprise.

Output options

Because color quality is essential for promoting a professional image and enhancing brands, leading printers and MFPs provide Pantone calibration and support for other industry standards. Users should also be able to key-in custom color formulas when it’s necessary to tweak colors to adjust for differences in how light reflects off various types of media. Named color replacement and RGB replacement enable organizations to create substitution tables by entering a unique CMYK recipe to create any color they wish. Some vendors offer this via expensive third-party controllers; the best options provide this free within printers and MFPs across all price points. RGB replacement also makes sure Microsoft Office documents print consistently on any device on the network.

Other important features include the ability to handle multiple types of media, ranging from standard and coated paper to card stock and specialized materials, such as vinyl label stock for industrial drums. A selection of finishing options, such as binding, stapling and three-hole punching, will also ensure that in-house print operations can accommodate most enterprise needs.

A foundation for the future

Thanks to the latest innovations in color printers and MFPs, enterprise managers have fewer and fewer reasons to send jobs to commercial print shops. In-house, on-demand color printing can not only be an economical choice, it also assures organizations that their color printed materials will achieve the highest levels of effectiveness from a business and risk standpoint.

To learn more about the benefits of today’s leading color printers and MFPs, please visit Lexmark at - See more at: Lexmark Color Solutions

Is less really more? Rethinking managed print services

“Print less” strategies move from revolution to evolution as organizations look for new ways to manage information - 

Far from over, MPS is evolving along with technology and business Now, many organizations are evaluating how the changing nature of MPS can provide an increasing return on investment. Today’s vision includes looking beyond managing printers to optimize and streamline workflows and business processes via print infrastructure. 

“Organizations have the opportunity to reduce costs, increase productivity, increase security and compliance and mitigate risk by developing, acquiring, or partnering for new competencies related to both print and electronic workflows,” states Holly Muscolino, Research VP, Document Solutions at research firm IDC. 

Enter smart managed print services. MPS is smarter than ever thanks to increasing capabilities, applications and analytics, and is able to not only help people optimize and manage infrastructure, but also streamline essential business processes across many industries. 

Multifunction products support MPS strategy 

Multifunction products (MFPs) act as a digital on-ramp to kick off various industry-specific business processes. Retail, manufacturing, insurance, government, healthcare and financial organizations are deploying smart managed print services in innovative and beneficial ways. For example, bank branches can benefit from MFPs for originating loans and opening new accounts in addition to accounts payable and receivables. 

Searching for structure? 

With the advent of tablets and smart phones, people are printing less by default. So it’s a natural evolution for MPS to help organizations manage other types of content. After all, documents exist in many forms beyond paper.

 Big data analytics drive MPS ROI 

The explosion of big data analytics also helps organizations reap the most benefits from their MPS dollars. With the advancing analytics trends, vendors can capture more data and get to know customers better—enabling vendors to better identify workflow optimization opportunities. 

If your organization has maximized its managed print services infrastructure, consider the additional benefits of taking the next step. With an MPS partner that listens to your needs, applies technology in an industry-specific fashion and uses a planned and phased implementation approach, you’ll be surprised at all the ways your PDM initiatives can evolve. - 

See more at: http://www.incontextmag.com/articles/2015/is-less-really-more--rethinking-managed-print-services.html#sthash.xd2FD8J1.dpuf

‘Open the possibilities’: Lexmark launches new brand

Lexmark is proud to announce the launch of our new logo as the part of the evolution of our brand. Today, we unveil our new brand to reflect on the outside what we’ve been working toward on the inside: to turn Lexmark into a global technology company that creates enterprise software, hardware and services. This will mean a merger of our software brands with our printing brands into one single, unified corporate identity.

We talked with Todd Hamblin, chief marketing officer, to discuss the reasoning behind the change and what it means for Lexmark and our customers.

Lexmark: Why a new brand and logo?

Hamblin: A brand is one of the first things that our customers interact with. It’s the tip of the spear for our visual identity. We have changed so much as a company in the past few years, and yet our visual identity remains anchored in our past. When customers look at our logo, they think print. The current logo doesn’t properly represent the company we’ve become. We refreshed the look.

Lexmark has been transformed by its acquisitions and the continued growth of our MPS business. We’ve acquired a number of strategic software companies since 2010. It was time to consolidate these brands into one corporate identity and visually communicate how Lexmark has evolved from a printing hardware solutions company to an enterprise software, hardware and services technology company.

Lexmark: The new logo features an aperture. The definition of an aperture is an opening or open space — like the opening of a camera lens — that admits light. What’s the significance behind this feature in Lexmark’s new logo?

Hamblin: An aperture can both expand and narrow. We love the visual symbolism of that – we are expanding our offering and capabilities, and combining it with our industry focused go-to-market strategies, thus how the aperture fits with our evolution as a company and what we are offering to our customers.

Lexmark: How does that translate in layman’s terms?

Hamblin: Lexmark has always had exceptional customer engagement. The aperture is a window — a window that focuses on customer pain points. This reinforces what we are determined to do, which is to continue to solve those problems. As we resolve customer pain points, we’ll also be able to open up the aperture to expand their view of what Lexmark can do for them.

Lexmark: Why green?

Hamblin: We selected the color green for three reasons. First, green is a color of rebirth and renewal, a new start for Lexmark and our family of companies. Second, the color green represents a distinct and unmistakable break from our past as well as a differentiated color in the market. Third, the color green also has application to sustainability and our commitment to being a responsible global company.

Lexmark: The new tagline is “Open the possibilities.” What does that mean for Lexmark customers?

Hamblin: With the launch of the new Lexmark brand, we are making a very visible statement to the world that this is a renewed company — an innovative global technology leader with a broader vision and bigger portfolio that goes beyond the many current expectations of Lexmark. This is reflected in the aperture feature of our new visual identity and in our tagline, “Open the possibilities.”

Lexmark: What’s happening to Perceptive Software?

Hamblin: Perceptive Software will transform from a company or division brand to a product brand. We will retain the equity of the Perceptive Software name, one that many customers know and respect, and will continue to use the Perceptive name for many of our lead enterprise software products. We will create a naming hierarchy so we can clearly communicate our full technology portfolio, and the end-to-end solutions we build from that technology, to solve our customers’ challenges.

To be consistent with this branding strategy, we are changing the internal team name of Perceptive Software to Enterprise Software.

Lexmark: What else would you like to say about the Lexmark’s new brand?

Hamblin: We feel really good about where we’ve landed. It feels true to who we are and the messaging that we want to provide. Refreshing and linking our brand messaging with our visual identity is really exciting.

Vendor Neutral Archive (VNA), Clinical images from all departments within the EMR.

Lexmark solutions for healthcare help bring the volume of content that resides outside of the EMR into a single view. Bolstered by Lexmark's Perceptive Software suite of products, we are the only vendor to bring together enterprise content management (ECM), vendor neutral archive (VNA), output management and clinical connectivity technology to help you deliver a complete patient record.

With Perceptive Software's vendor neutral archive (VNA) solution, powered by Acuo Technologies, establishes an open, standards-based technology platform for all clinical content, helping healthcare organizations worldwide manage and share all of this patient data across the continuum of care. This gives primary care physicians, referring physicians, radiologists, specialists, and ultimately the patient needed access to clinical content.

 With Perceptive's VNA you can:

• Free your clinical content from departmental archives
• Create a single integration point for all clinical content across all disciplines
• Enable interoperability and data liquidity across multiple PACS, storage vendors, departments, clinics, hospitals and beyond
• Minimize financial and operational impact, reducing costs through flexibility of choice in infrastructure, consolidation, bandwidth and "never again" migration
• Improve performance, scalability and availability, through on-demand capacity growth, with no impact to caregivers 

To learn more about vendor neutral archive and data migration services available from Perceptive Software visit www.percpetivesoftware.com/vna

Lexmark’s smart MFP ecosystem grows with new serverless capabilities, mobile solutions

Have you heard the industry term, “smart MFP ecosystem?” It’s one you’ll be hearing a lot from Lexmark.

The company has embraced this term as a way to describe our combination of hardware, software, tools and services.

The concept explains Lexmark’s portfolio of offerings and positions the evolution of our printers to help customers understand how our offerings fit together and work seamlessly to solve their pain points.

Enhancing the ecosystem

To make the ecosystem even more dynamic, Lexmark today announced new serverless solutions and apps for large and small businesses, government agencies, schools and universities.

By reducing or eliminating servers, the solutions help minimize investment related to hardware costs, IT administration and energy consumption, among others.

Included in the announcement:

Lexmark AccuRead Automate

The new serverless Lexmark AccuRead Automate runs entirely on a Lexmark smart multifunction product (MFP) embedded with Perceptive technology. It automates back office processes by helping users capture, automatically classify and route information.

“The solution trains the MFP to classify and preprocess hardcopy documents and extract data before they ever reach an ERP or accounting system,” said Rick Kallop, process improvement consultant for Lexmark. “For what this serverless solution can do, it’s a real game changer.”

“This solution is unique among MFP vendors,” said Rick Robinson, solutions marketing manager. “AccuRead Automate is ideal for small to midsize business customers who do not want to invest in server-based technology, as well as enterprise customers in distributed places, such as retail stores and bank branches, where bandwidth is tight.”

Lexmark Serverless Print Release

The new Lexmark Serverless Print Release enables users to print securely from anywhere within the organization.

Unlike standard Print Release – in which jobs are held in a server on premise or in the cloud before users print them – the Windows-based serverless solution holds the job on the local PC. When the user goes to a printer to release the job, the solution pulls the job off that person’s PC and sends it to the printer.

“With this offering, the IT infrastructure required for print can be reduced by eliminating print servers,” said Mark Vance, program manager in global marketing. “This adds another layer of flexibility to our Lexmark Print Management portfolio for customers ranging from small and medium businesses to global enterprises with remote locations.”

Lexmark Mobile Direct

Lexmark mobile printing solutions enable printing from any mobile device including iOS, Android, Windows, or BlackBerry. Lexmark Print Management is the first print management software solution to become AirPrint certified. Users can print directly into their print release queue using the native print features of iOS. A new offer for printing via direct mobile connectivity is also now available for Android.

Lexmark Mobile Direct allows an Android phone with the Lexmark Mobile Print App to print to a WiFi-enabled printer using near field communication (NFC). The benefit is you don’t have to know the address of the device or do any setup. You can simply hold your phone near the MFP or printer to connect, then tap “print.”

Learn more

Learn more about Lexmark’s smart MFP ecosystem and the new solutions at the following links:

• Lexmark smart MFP ecosystem on Lexmark.com
• AccuRead Automate

Training document data to behave

What if you could train your document data to behave? A new solution from Lexmark could help you manage key information during the pre- and post-scanning of hardcopy documents more efficiently than your current process.

Lexmark’s AccuRead Automate, a serverless application residing on a Lexmark Smart multifunction printer (MFP), helps ensure documents are routed properly and are easily available to those who need them.

“The AccuRead Automate solution trains the MFP to classify and preprocess hardcopy documents and extract data before they ever reach an ERP or accounting system,” said Rick Kallop, process improvement consultant for Lexmark. “For what this serverless solution can do, it’s a real game changer,” Kallop added.

The result is a simpler and easier serverless capture process, requiring little user training. Plus, it runs on your Lexmark MFP, saving the cost and management of an additional server, keeping all activity within your network and behind your firewall.

“Lexmark’s AccuRead Automate solution can be used in horizontal applications across multiple departments such as accounts payable and human resources,” said Doug Frazier, solutions business development manager for Lexmark. “This serverless solution is embedded on the Lexmark device, which helps automate processes and frees up valuable IT resources.”

Lexmark customer Dave Bell, executive director of the Greater Louisville YMCA, has been using the solution and is impressed with its functionality.

“This is one of the most amazing solutions we have implemented,” said Bell. “It will save us hours of time in the processing of our invoices.”

The application has several features to help speed processes and improve efficiencies, and can also be customized to fit a company’s specific data capture needs.

• Document classification: Identifies and automatically classifies the scanned images of documents loaded in the MFP’s automatic document feeder

• Data extraction: Locates and extracts up to four individual fields of data on a page and includes the data in an index file and/or the image file name

• Document routing: Sends images of documents to pre-defined network folders

• Notifications: Communicates job status, required actions or important messages on the MFP touch screen or via email

• Manual review: Lets user verify and edit extracted data at the MFP prior to routing

• Smart file names: Uses extracted data from a document with a time stamp to create dynamic file names and image indexing metadata

• Self-learning technology: Recognizes and automatically classifies new documents without requiring templates

• Searchable PDF creation: Uses AccuRead optical character recognition to make any scanned text-based document searchable

For more information about Lexmark’s AccuRead Automate, click here.

Going green: How Lexmark recycles your toner cartridges

Since 1991, Lexmark has offered its customers free and easy to use methods of recycling their empty toner cartridges through the Lexmark Cartridge Collection Program (LCCP). But what happens once Lexmark receives those cartridges?

To gather more intelligence about LCCP, and to find out what the program offers our customers and how it helps the environment, we talked to Rob Burkholder, program manager of supplies sustainability for Lexmark.

Lexmark: What is the Lexmark Cartridge Collection Program?  

Burkholder: At Lexmark we are dedicated to environmentally friendly business practices and since our inception, have been encouraging customers to do their part by sending us their used toner cartridges.

The LCCP program incents customers to recycle in several ways:

1. Lexmark provides free customer return methods for toner cartridges
2. Lexmark offers various incentive programs that make it easier to do the right thing
3. Lexmark reuses or recycles the components and parts of the toner cartridges, adhering to a zero landfill and incineration policy

With the help of our customers, the number of cartridges returned per year has increased more than 25 times since 1996, with more than 20 million pounds of material saved from landfills worldwide last year alone.

Lexmark: What are some of the goals of LCCP?

Burkholder: There are two specific supplies sustainability goals related to LCCP.

The first is to increase the amount of post-consumer recycled (PCR) plastic in newly produced parts to 25 percent by 2018. What does this mean? After first sorting through the materials returned via LCCP to recover components that can be reused, some of the remaining plastic is then separated and shredded into flakes. The flakes are then either re-compounded into pellets or used as is. This material is referred to as PCR plastic. The PCR plastic is then combined with new plastic material during the injection molding process to create new components for our toner cartridges.

What previously could have been considered waste contributes to the production of a new product. As more PCR plastic is used, less new material is required, resulting in positive benefits for the environment.

Our second goal is to increase the reuse of cartridge material, by weight, to 50 percent by 2018. For materials returned through the program, reuse has the greatest sustainability benefit for the environment.

In the last 10 years alone, Lexmark has been able to incorporate more than 40 million pounds of material (select components recovered through the LCCP) into the new production of toner cartridges across our line of monochrome printers. These cartridges are produced on the same production lines and are subject to the same rigorous quality tests as cartridges built with all new components. Recent research and development efforts have aided this goal by focusing on the creation of even more robust, durable cartridge designs in conjunction with more energy-efficient printers. The more durable product enables a greater percentage of designated toner cartridge components to be reused after recovery through the LCCP.

Lexmark: How long does the recycling process take?

Burkholder: It could take as little as one month for the transformation from used cartridge to a cartridge ready to print again – from customer replacement to return shipment to receiving, sorting, cleaning, production, testing, distribution, customer receipt, installation and finally printing.

Lexmark: Where in the world can you recycle a Lexmark toner cartridge?

Burkholder: Our collection programs are currently available in more than 60 countries, which represent approximately 90% of our global market. You can go to lexmark.com to find out how you can specifically recycle your toner cartridge in your country.