By Gail Balfour

We're living in the electronic age. So why are so many Canadian firms printing more than ever?

Whatever happened to those halcyon visions of a clean desk without paper clutter? It’s not like we don’t posses the technology to achieve this. But when experts predicted we would all be working in a paperless office by now, they were overlooking one thing— humans like to print stuff. “People really love paper—that’s something we are realizing more and more,” said Paul Smith, the laboratory manager at Xerox Research Centre of Canada (XRCC) in Mississauga, Ont. In fact, corporate printer sales have been steadily growing year over year, said Bradley Hughes, research analyst at Toronto-based IDC Canada. He said that in 2005 alone, the colour laser market grew a whopping 91 per cent. What surprised him more was the fact that the monochrome printing market is also still growing. And, according to Forrester Research, even though 47 per cent of Canadians now receive an online statement for their bank accounts, a full 86 per cent also continue to receive a paper statement by mail.

Why do we like paper and printing so much? There are many theories. For some of us, it’s pretty simple—we just don’t trust computers, and paper gives us a warm fuzzy feeling. Also, pervasive document-based technologies such as e-mail have precipitated a flood of printouts, because we often print messages. A decade ago, much of that communication would have taken the form of a telephone call. And printing has become commoditized; some devices are so inexpensive they are almost viewed as disposable. Digital cameras also have caused a huge consumer demand for colour printers. And let’s not forget the fact that humans are tactile beings—we like the feel, the readability and the portability of paper. To some extent, though, it’s also about inertia. “You ask people why they are printing (documents) and they say ‘Well, we’ve always done it that way.’ Instead, they could be putting those on a document management system so they are searchable,” said Dave Desjardins, managing principal for business process services, Xerox Global Services in Toronto. According to Desjardins, Gartner Group estimates the average document is copied—either physically or electronically—nine to 11 times, at a total cost of about US$18. “If it becomes an electronic copy that’s stored and managed correctly, it eliminates all that paper. “You are trying to build that whole crawl/walk/run situation, where content management will lead to document management (and eventually) to knowledge management.” 

No Change Soon 

So is it time to adjust our expectations about that clean desk? “We will probably never see a paperless office in our working lifetime,” admitted James Firestone, president of Xerox North America, while speaking at an analyst conference the company held recently in New York. “But at some point in time, you are going to do less and less printing.” The point Xerox and other document companies are stressing these days isn’t so much the elimination of printing, but smarter printing and the use of digital documents for most critical information along with processes that cause people to think before they print. “When people say paperless office nowadays, it’s not that there’s no paper, it’s that the piece of paper is a disposable copy,” Hughes said. “So now, what you are most concerned about is that the permanent record should be an electronic version.” Harold Esche, CIO of the University of Calgary sums up this theory nicely. “I like to think I have a paperless office…it just happens to have a lot of paper in it,” he said. “But it’s transient, it doesn’t stay in my hands for long.”

University of Calgary pins big hopes on its new print-management contract

Over the course of one year, the university of calgary (u of c) prints on so much paper that—if stacked—it would equal the height of 48 calgary towers. Once CIO Harold Esche came up with this figure, he knew he was onto something big.

This virtual tower of printed materials translates to about 9,144 metres or 72 million sheets. “We did the calculations a couple of times because we thought, ‘No—that’s too much,’” Esche said.

The information gleaned from this exercise was the catalyst behind the U of C’s seven-year contract with Xerox Canada, which began last spring. The goals of the project include replacing most of the university’s existing printers with multi-function printing devices (MFPs), better managing the printing process and providing a digital environment that would make the printing of documents far less necessary.

Research pointing to print management as a cost-saving “hidden gem” convinced esche to investigate. “Printing isn’t particularly sexy for most people…it isn’t something they think a whole lot about. But it’s not just about the printing—it’s about the way we handle information.”

In fact, companies are starting to grow more aware of the money they spend on printing, according to Bradley Hughes, research analyst with Toronto-based IDC Canada. “If you look at the spending priorities, it’s still way down the list compared to other it items, such as desktop computing, servers or networking. But i think it’s a growing realization.”

Hughes said it can be challenging to figure out the total cost, as devices are often scattered throughout organizations and the maintenance and supply costs are never added together because they tend to fall under different cost centres and budgets.

“The University of Calgary was very smart in making sure that change came from the top.”

Esche said figuring out how just much they printed wasn’t easy: they had to start with a rough estimate, even in terms of how many machines they owned.

“That really illustrated to us what an ad hoc environment we had,” he said. “If you can’t even figure out how many printers you have, it shows you are not managing that resource. It wouldn’t matter so much if it didn’t have such a high price tag.”

Esche was surprised there were about 130 different types of printers on campus, and by the fact that some of them were older than the students.

This is not an unusual predicament, according to dave desjardins, managing principal for business process services, Xerox Global Services, Toronto. “Companies have no idea how much they are spending on printing or machines because it’s the old ‘oh yeah, we forgot about that one,’ or, ‘we need to keep that one (printer) because it’s special.’ People figure technology is going to solve everything, but they forget about the process.”

Esche said that, even though the project is in its early days, they are already seeing a reduction in the total number of devices, a decrease in printing and associated costs, as well as an increase in service level. Some people will always be more comfortable printing documents, he said, but the university’s goal is to greatly reduce print costs by providing an environment where printing is no longer necessary. Students have online portfolios they can add to throughout their course of study, new web-based workflow and content management systems will allow students to hand in assignments digitally, and faculty will have course notes available online. “Simply sending assignments by attachment is not good enough because all you’re doing is just shifting the printing around,” he said.

Built-in functionality within the devices, such as automated ordering of toner, is also making a big cost difference, because it means they don’t have to carry extra inventory in local spaces—a cost that quickly adds up. “Why would you want to have a toner cartridge sitting on every floor, in every unit? You end up with hundreds, if not thousands, of these things.”

Paperless Paper, One Step Closer to Reality

We have been hearing about the possibility of an interactive “epaper” for decades, but will we ever actually see a device outside the walls of a research lab? Yes, Paul Smith said, but probably not for a few more years.

“Printable electronics is in its infancy. People want the flexibility of having something updatable, refreshable,” said Smith, laboratory manager, Xerox Research Centre of Canada (xrcc) in Mississauga, Ont. “Right now though, there aren’t really many kinds of technologies that are able to do that.”

Some firms, like E Ink in Cambridge, Mass. and Irex technologies of the Netherlands, currently offer products that scratch the surface of this vision. E ink provides e-paper technology for e-books, and irex has an electronic reader, called the iLiad, that is used in Belgium for an electronic newspaper. Subscribers to the financial newspaper De Tijd can have news pages beamed to them wirelessly and the content is refreshed a few times a day.

Although such products are a first step in making e-paper a reality, they are not ideal. For one thing, they require a rigid backplane to work, and therefore are heavy and do not have the tactile feel nor the flexibility of paper. the other challenge is that the technology behind them is still very expensive.

Smith said the ideal e-paper will be inexpensive, flexible and durable, because people don’t tend to treat paper very well. and if people can’t treat this new product like paper, then it won’t replace paper in any major way.

Currently, siliconebased transistors are one reason the technology is so pricey, Smith said. Manufacturing the transistors requires expensive equipment like clean rooms, vacuum systems and high temperatures.

Xerox is developing organic-based chips that are less expensive to make than silicone ones. Nanotechnology-enabled electronic ink would be used to physically print the transistors on inexpensive and flexible film-like “paper,” allowing the content to be refreshed.

“You need to consider two aspects: the frontplane that gives you all the colour and readability, and the backplane that gives you the control of the image, the thin film transistors and all the logic behind them.” Smith predicts this technology will prove very disruptive, but warned: “this is in the early stages of development—we are not looking at the next couple of years here.”