subject: What's Your Office Machine Costing You? [print this page] What's Your Office Machine Costing You? What's Your Office Machine Costing You?
There are plenty of acronyms and abbreviations for almost everything in today's business vocabulary but "TCO" which stands for "Total Cost of Ownership" and how it relates to your office printing, packs a lot of definition into those three simple letters.
Total cost of ownership is more than just what your office machine alone costs you. It includes the resource or "soft" costs which this piece of equipment brings with it once you plug it in and begin to utilize it.
TCO= Machine - Supplies - Repairs/Service
Over a printer's "lifetime" it will require regular maintenance, supplies (consumables) and possibly regular repairs. Depending on what your office needs may be, choosing a machine which fits into your print environment and your budget at the moment, is usually top priority. However, if you're not looking down the road at what this machine will end up costing you over the course of it's operational life, you may want to look again.
Example: A new inkjet printer, which may only cost you $199.00 has a cartridge with a yield of about 400 pages. That cartridge in today's market costs you approx. $20.00. Based on a page printed at 5% coverage (a brief office memo in black and white) each page that you print is costing you $.05. ($20.00/400=.05) The machine itself was so inexpensive that if it breaks, you'll most likely throw it away and just buy another one.
A new black and white laserjet printer may cost you $500.00 or more and the cartridges on average cost about $150.00. However, these cartridges, at that same 5% of coverage yield up to 10,000 pages each. They don't need to be changed as frequently, they won't dry out if you don't use them everyday and they'll only cost you $.015 per page. A penny and half per page!
It would literally take $500.00 worth of inkjet cartridges to produce the same amount of pages as it would on a laserjet cartridge for only $150.00. What's your printer's TCO?
