Hewlett Packard (HP) has announced that it saved a whopping $3.5 billion (N413 billion) at the end of last financial year 2007, for optimising the usage of printing and imaging solution technology.

Mr. Emmanuel Eze, Imaging and Printing Group (IPG) Lead, West Africa, who revealed this last week in Lagos during the company's Open Day tagged "HP - Technology for better business outcomes", advised corporate organisations to save tremendous costs by optimally applying technology in their operations.

According to him, companies achieved average direct cost savings between 8-41 per cent by implementing a managed imaging and output environment, even as enterprises that actively manage their printer fleets could save between 10 percent and 30 percent of their overall printing costs.

Eze, who later took participants comprising IT heads of organisations, on products demonstration, noted that the imaging and printing network environment is quietly becoming a significant business asset.

According to him, after IT standardization and consolidation, companies are turning to imaging and printing to increase competitiveness and enhance their bottom line.

The IPG Lead, represented by Mr. Ken Dibor of the same unit, listed three steps to optimize and simplify the enterprise printing and copying network to include fleet optimisation through balanced deployment, HP Total Print Management (TPM) /fleet management, as well as digital workflow optimisation.

The TPM is an integrated, scalable solution that right-sizes and manages the imaging and printing fleet to reduce costs, while improving IT and end-user productivity. Its key components include intelligent devices, scalable services and management software.

Listed benefits of TPM include transparency on printing behaviour and needs, design of an optimised fleet, increased device utilisation without compromising productivity, standardized and simplified infrastructure, optimised network integration, end-to-end security, state-of-the-art fleet management processes, and cost transparency and control.

Eze also advocated the use of Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) concept which originated with the Gartner group in 1987 and is a methodology to assess direct and indirect costs related to not only the cost of purchase, but all aspects in the further use and maintenance of the equipment considered. It also provides a cost basis for determining the economic value of an investment in any financial benefit analysis.

HP, according to him, can help reduce TCO by saving costs through job accounting, rule based printing/follow me printing, easy integration, configuration and installation, flexible set of global services, HP's Instant-on technology, duplexing options for automated double-sided printing, remote/pro-active troubleshooting, virtually maintenance-free devices, HP smart printing technology and high quality, highly reliable products.

In answering imaging and printing needs of organizations, HP, he said, utilises the power of printing and imaging technology to meet clients' business objectives, develops enterprise-wide printing and imaging strategy including security requirements, achieve seamless global services from a single source, starts saving on printing and imaging network environment without compromising end user productivity, adapts easily to changing needs and optimises digital workflow process integration.