cost savings

Improve IT service levels at little or no cost - Microsoft’s Spotlight on Costs

Microsoft has released a video & whitepaper series on optimizing an organization’s core infrastructure. This series reviews 31 best practices that can improve IT service levels at little or no cost. It seems to me that the series is obviously Microsoft solution-centric but the series may still be of use to your organization. Take some time and at least look through the 29 page whitepaper and see if the suggestions will help improve the top or bottom line at your organization.

How about leaving some tips or feedback here for other ITKE readers. Let us know what works and what didn’t in your organizations to improve service levels and/or reduce costs.

Thanks for reading & let’s continue to be good network citizens.

Saving Money & Stopping spam - change domain names

Are you getting lots of SPAM? Is your organization’s internet link being saturated due to tons of inbound spam and maybe outbound non-delivery notices for invalid addresses? About 3 years ago, ours was too. Continued »

Cost saving measures - printing? Really?

I don’t know about your organizations but the one I work for is doing as much as possible to reduce costs in these hard times. We have gone through the staffing reductions, travel restrictions, site closures, salary reductions like most other organizations. Now an outside vendor has come to us saying they can help save us money in printing. Granted, there may be some cost savings there and I hope there is. However, some of the statistical information they provided has me wondering about the accuracy and scope.

I don’t have full details yet of how the survey was done, but the vendor reported that the average user in this office exceeds 26 printed pages per day. So, for an office of about 80 people, this is over 2080 pages per day - or over 4 reams of paper. The survey also says that black/white costs are 2.5 cents per page and color is 17.2 cents per page. Do these number seem reasonable or has your organization done a similar printing survey?

One of the issues I have with this is if the volume survey was done in January, that is not really the most representative month for printing volumes. That is the month when month-end, quarter-end and year-end financial statements are produced. There is a lot of “unusual” print volume during the first month of the year.

A cost saving recommendation, of course to come back from the vendor, is to use duplex printing where possible. Most of the printers in this office have been here for well over 5 years. They were not purchased with the duplex print options to save costs at the initial purchase time. So, this is not really an available option on most of the printers. The users of course could print 2 pages per page (as I typically try to do), but then the print is very small and can be difficult to read which can create errors or cause stress. So, is this a good option either?

I’d like to hear from some IT-Trenches readers - please share with me your experiences with printing cost saving measures. I’m sure other readers would appreciate your tips, tricks and insights.

Thanks for reading & let’s continue to be good network citizens.