1. Can you control employees’ printing and copying habits? You’ve just looked at your company’s total spending and it’s way too high, particularly in the areas of energy and supplies.87 Top managers have ordered you to cut costs, so you sit down to assess the situation. The main culprits are the nearly 3,000 printers, copiers, scanners, and fax machines crowding your 200 offi ce sites. A recent inventory shows that you have one machine for every four employees.

Running so many machines racks up huge operating costs for your company (buying supplies like ink and paper, electricity, and renting enough offi ce space to contain them). Machine breakdowns, a frequent occurrence because of the sheer number of machines, eat up even more time and money with maintenance and repairs.

Mechanical breakdowns are also mucking up your organization’s chain-of-command, since no one knows who is responsible for which machines.

Even when the machines themselves are running effi -

ciently, they generate confusion. Employees are printing too many documents and making too many copies—so many, in fact, that people are loosing track of them.

Every offi ce you visit is fi lled with humming machines and fl urries of paper. This makes it hard to fi nd paper fi les when they are needed. Even worse, you’re in danger of accidentally leaking confi dential information. Still, having such a high machine-employee ratio means that employees don’t spend a lot of time collecting copies (and collecting coffee and conversation on the way).

Clearly, your company’s printing is out of control.

But how to get it back into control? You can reduce the number of machines and save on costs, or you can implement more controls on employees in the way of policies and procedures.