Managing large fleets of printers is a tiresome job for any IT department, but it is particularly irksome if support staff need to cover multiple offices.

In this situation, passing the responsibility to a third party or printer vendor can sometimes be worth the expense. The problem then comes in calculating a fair price for leasing and maintaining a variety of print devices producing different types of output.

HP recently pledged to make the pricing for usage-based print services more transparent, giving IT managers an itemised list of exactly who printed what and where, and how much it cost per page in terms of paper, ink and maintenance charges.

Unfortunately, the vendor was unable to back up its pledge with hard numbers. An estimate for how much it would cost a firm to print, say, 500 colour pages on one of HP’s new CM8060 multi-function printers (MFPs) would have been useful, but the vendor couldn’t oblige because, it said, so many variables need to be taken into account. These include such things as volume discounts, which are set according to how many devices the service contract covers and how many years the customer is willing to sign up for.

The deal also involves HP making an assessment of an organisation’s print requirements, then applying a monthly charge based on what is essentially a prediction. A firm might end up paying more or less than it otherwise would depending on, say, how many holiday pictures are knocked out by staff during a particular period.

Eliminating such unwarranted use of business printers is an obvious way to cut costs, and is an issue that vendors are increasingly focusing on. Soon all business-class printers will feature integrated authentication mechanisms that make printers available on a strictly need-to-print basis. Biometrics and smart card readers may be a security step too far for most organisations, but obliging workers to input simple PIN codes alongside a user name and password at the device before a job can be processed will go a long way to making sure that nobody is frittering away expensive colour ink.

The average enterprise has a lot of printing slack, some of which can be tightened by replacing dedicated copiers with space-saving print-copiers that use less electricity than two separate units.

The big question is not whether money can be saved, but how much of those potential savings will fall back into printer vendors’ pockets through outsourced print services.