Criteria for Wireless, All-in-One Printers

The Rogue River Auto Store is a new and used car dealership that also sells parts and service. The company wants to replace eight older model printers with new models located in various departments in the dealership.

The staff at Rogue prints large volumes of predominately black-and-white documents. They would like printers with multifunction (all-in-one) capabilities, such as scanning, printing, faxing, and copying. The management at Rogue would also like to be able to connect the printers to the wireless network recently installed in their store. Wireless printers have the advantage of being portable, so they could be moved to any part of the store as needed.

The management at Rogue would like you to investigate the characteristics of wireless all-in- one printers and design a spreadsheet with evaluation criteria for selecting the new printers. Design your spreadsheet so you can evaluate several models of printers. You can use Internet resources or other resources, such as those described in this chapter, to help you develop the evaluation criteria. For instance, one criterion could be related to the cost of supplies (such as the per-page cost of a printed sheet). When you have a tentative list of factors to evaluate, compare the criteria you developed with those of your school or work colleagues. Did they suggest criteria you could add to your spreadsheet?

When you have a final list of criteria, choose some weights for each criterion. Before finalizing your spreadsheet, compare your weights with those identified by your colleagues. Are the weights they chose similar to yours? Where are they significantly different? Try to narrow the differences in weights.

Finally, pick a couple of models of printers to research that you think will meet Rogues needs and fill in as much of your spreadsheet as you can. If possible, pick the same printer models as your colleagues so you can compare your results with theirs. Discuss any significant