The past month i’ve been looking for a way to streamline management of the color printers utilized in our head office, personally i favor to outsource them. At the moment head office utilize 2 Color Laser Printers most of the time they are used to printout reports to customers then sales and bid documents come next. Trying to manage them is a bother, at least once a week someone will complain to my staff about the availability.

Searching around in Jakarta i didn’t find any company which would rent color printers, instead Multifunction Color Photocopier vendors are more than happy to provide the service with copy and scan features added to my initial intention. After querying 3 vendors we came up with the best solution where we would lease a machine for 30 months @ 4.3 million a month and pay Rp 2.000 per page after 500 pages.

Now the next task is to convince management to ease my job. For that i had to dig into the purchase register and extract purchase of CMYK Toners and Imaging Drums from 1st of January till this present date. To my surprise we spent a total of Rp 142,371,500 just for consumables!!! After that I had to extract number of pages printed, for this I used the CUPS Print Report, and found out that 35,876 pages were printed.

From the above we can calculate that one page in average would cost Rp 3,968 utilizing 2 color copiers, and if we were to print 5,000 pages per month using a Multifunction Color Photocopier it would cost Rp 2,360 / page. What a dream cheaper solution yet lesser complaints.

Still freakin management wants me to comparing a higher grade printer with print capacity up to 10,000 pages per month against this Multifunction Color Photocopier.