Print Optimization Services > Print Environments We Serve

One of Pharos Systems' guiding principles is that a print management and optimization strategy must integrate cost and process controls across the entire enterprise — because print in one environment affects print in another. Consequently, we look at all three environments where print happens: in the office, in centralized production facilities, and externally-sourced.

Our recommendations for optimizing these environments will be very attentive to your requirements but otherwise unbiased because we do not make or sell printing equipment or supplies, nor do we provide break-fix service. In recognition of the fact that print environments are rarely completely homogeneous, Pharos has always been vendor-neutral and multi-vendor in terms of how we operate (and that includes our technology).

We follow a dual path to optimization: sourcing excellence to achieve the lowest prices and process excellence to achieve the lowest costs. Our On-Site Print Specialists manage RFP processes, spearhead the migration to digital workflows, manage vendor performance against service level agreements, and continuously identify new opportunities to save money, print less, and print greener.

Office Print
U.S. companies spend between $650 and $1250 per person per year on office printing. For a company with 20,000 employees, that means an expenditure somewhere between $13 million and $25 million every year. That’s a lot of money.

Pharos Systems can help you cut spending on office print by 40%. We do this by changing user printing behavior, rightsizing the fleet (the right size and the right capabilities), and migrating paper-based workflows to digital. Our optimization services will enable your company to achieve less printing, greener printing, lower costs, and better prices.

We deploy Pharos Blueprint® Enterprise software to track office printing. We also analyze:

• Your entire equipment fleet, including all print, copy, fax, and scan devices (their location, cost, volume, capacity, capabilities, and employee-to-device ratio)
• Vendor contracts for hardware, software, and services
• Vendor invoices for hardware, software, and services
• Vendor obligations and performance against current service level agreements
• Voice of the customer
• Help Desk calls
• Spending on paper, toner, and all other consumables

Blueprint Enterprise provides the foundation for fleet optimization and vendor management through its comprehensive tracking, costing, and reporting capabilities at the user, job, and device level. Additionally, two Blueprint applications, Policy Print™ and Secure Release Here®, enable more responsible end user printing behavior, thereby reducing print volumes and waste.

Centralized Production
Centralized production facilities produce everything from manuals, directories, and technical documentation to company stationery, forms, and compliance documents. Many companies are heavily invested in these operations from a fixed-cost perspective and intend their in-plants to be low cost, high quality centers of excellence.

However, as run-lengths have shortened and budgets have tightened, many end users do not want to provide a charge number for work to be done in the centralized facility and end up running longer and longer jobs in the office because of the perception that it's "free”. As a result, all of the in-plants that Pharos Systems has examined in the past several years have had excess capacity, and work continues to migrate from them to the most expensive devices in the fleet.

Pharos can help reduce your in-plant costs by up to 25%. We will look at the capabilities and usage of the facility, existing vendor contracts and invoices, vendor performance against service level agreements, facility and labor costs, paper-sourcing processes and costs, job tickets, security requirements, and budgets. We also conduct interviews with users of the facility and dig into bypass (work that should be run in the production center, but isn’t).

Externally-Sourced Printing
Each year, businesses spend billions of dollars on annual reports, brochures, promotional sheets, direct mail, and a wide array of other marketing collateral that are externally-procured from traditional offset printers, on-demand digital printers, and specialty printers. Analysts report that commercial printing represents the largest portion of a business’s print spending. Yet most businesses have few controls in place to manage it. The responsibility for buying print is often dispersed among many departments and spending is spread across a multitude of suppliers. Print buyers focus on the cost per piece while marketing organizations care about the cost per response — and nobody is measuring the total lifecycle costs.

Pharos Systems’ services can save you up to 35% on externally-sourced printing, often in a very short period of time. We analyze and build an optimization strategy around:

• All of your spending on external print, including freight and postage, prep and file transfer charges, rush and change order charges, pre-flighting charges, agency charges and fees, etc.
• All costs associated with PO to payment, including all related spec-bid-buy processes
• Document services outsourced to third-party providers
• Costs associated with inventory, fulfillment, and distribution
• Obsolescence, WIP, and waste charges
• Design for manufacturability, for digital, and the overall fit to manufacturing