Abusing office equipment

Tuesday, 01 July 2008 00:00

Up to 80 percent of employees across South Africa misuse their company`s office automation equipment on a daily basis. Holger Groenert knows how to counter the spiralling costs of abuse. The abuse of office automation equipment by employees not only costs businesses millions of rand off their annual bottom line, but most bosses either don`t know what to do or neg-lect what needs to be done to stop the flagrant abuse of company resources.

With the downturn in the economy now firmly on every company radar screen, those that do not have a strategy in place to cut costs and run efficiently can only be deemed irresponsible. Inappropriate use of company property is unlikely to ever be eradicated, but it can be managed to the benefit of both employer and employee. Office automation constitutes businesses` sixth biggest spend and companies now have little option but to include the management of this environment in their overall cost control strategy.

Managers must accept that people who spend all day at work will occasionally need to make a copy of a document or send a fax. And while a prison camp environment is not the answer, bringing the use and cost of printers, fax machines and photocopiers under control certainly is.

How much are businesses losing? Consider the following: in a medium-sized business with approximately 250 staff members, on average, half of the staff copy and print 25 pages per day. This equals 3 200 pages per day and an estimated ten percent are colour and 90 percent black and white. Based on costs of six cents for printing and five cents for paper, each black-and-white print costs 11 cents. Colour costs are 70 cents for printing and five cents per page. The company would, on average, print 320 colour pages a day, at 75 cents each, costing R240 per day. The 2 880 black-and-white copies end up costing R317 per day. This costs the company R557 for printing and copying per day and R11 136 per month.

Now add to this the price of electricity and wasted labour costs while staff print and copy personal items at work, constantly replacing office automation consumables and the expense of running multiple offices.

How should spiralling costs be tackled? Many companies already use multifunctional printers (MFPs) and user authentication to validate users who have certain privileges, decided by management, attached to their profile. Certain employees may or may not be allowed to print, fax, copy and scan. From an accountability and governance perspective, an audit trail ensures that records are kept for every transaction performed. Document is enhanced as specialised software can track which employee has printed which document. Reports can be formulated for each user and billing can be attached to those. Overall, manageability is enhanced and costs and abuse are reduced by between 20 and 40 percent.

While this goes a long way, the best method to gain immediate control is to implement a user accounting strategy across the company. Each user has an account that allows them to print and photocopy a certain number of pages per month. If they deplete the allocated amount, they can obtain additional credits from the powers that be. Every user account can be audited to see what machine has been used to print or copy documents around the company on a particular day.

Over and above user accounting, companies must initiate an education drive to show employees how to get the most out of the office automation equipment.

No matter what type of office automation technology is rolled out, paper is here to stay and so too are increasing office costs if companies don`t take drastic action. Having the right policies and processes integrated with the correct equipment, which is consistently monitored and controlled, is a good place to start.

Tags: Columns  Guest Column