Last week, we discussed how the Pandemic has reshaped work as we know it. Pre COVID-19, remote and hybrid work seemed futuristic, or you were considered “lucky” to have a work-from-home (WFH) job even though some people couldn’t fathom how you got any work done with normal home-life distractions. And now? In-office work seems to be the new “strange” while employers try different tactics to manage the new work landscape. As an employer, how do you navigate the possible effects the office, hybrid and WFH scenarios on your business, and how can you remain cost effective with the office printing equipment you provide your employees? The real question, is whether your business is proactive or reactive?

Whether breaking up your larger central office into smaller regional offices to allow employees to still be together and collaborate in person with their teams, like R/GA has considered, moving to a hybrid environment where you can downsize office space and rotate employees half-in and half-out, or going fully remote and helping your employees get setup at home with screaming internet, ergonomic chair and desk options, and cost effective office printing equipment - office space as we know it is changing. De-urbanization is now becoming more than a trending theory, where WFH employees realize they need more space at home to work AND live and are moving out of congested urban cities in droves.

So what does this mean for the printing industry, when employees are not fully back to work and may not be until 2022 or beyond as SalesForce has already announced, or are WFH or hybrid? Is print a dying industry? Absolutely not! Printing on large enterprise networked A3 production copiers may slowly become a thing of the past though, as these larger equipment aren’t needed if only 25-50% of the employees are occupying an office. If employees WFH, there are more cost-effective laser A4 (aka desktop printers and multifunction MFP) options available for printing, copying, scanning than the money-pits that are the traditional inkjet printer.

In Work Reimagined – Part 1, I shared that The Imaging Channel and BPO Media posted a weekly series called the “End User Snapshot” asking respondents whether print was still important to their job/task, who actually is doing the printing, which verticals are still dependent on printing, and how did the Pandemic affect printing. The results? Two thirds of those who responded showed that printing was still a vital part of their daily work, ticking up or down a bit depending on the level of their management role within their company. The verticals most dependent on printing? Think Education (both K-12 and Higher Ed), Healthcare, Financial/Banking, Government and Retail/Wholesale. Just how much of an impact is daily printing for them? 77-90% of respondents within these verticals said that “daily printing was important to their work productivity”.

An important question to ask is, how has the #printindustry responded to the Pandemic? Let’s look at Xerox and their 2020 year-end financial reporting as an example, and how they’ve been able to pivot. While they reported a 21% decrease in total revenue and an over 17% decrease in equipment sales revenue last year, they also made an impactful observation: “The decrease was driven primarily by lower sales of color devices and product constraints with our black and white devices as a result of high demand for lower-end printers and MFPs (primarily of black-and-white devices) in part associated with hybrid-workplace trends...partially offset by higher sales of mono personal printers and MFPs....”

Did you catch that? “Product constraints as a result of high demand for lower-end printers and MFPs...in part associated with hybrid-workplace.” This means that the OEMs pivoted to focus more on the increase in demand for A4 style desktop printers and MFPs...a demand that has affected most of the OEMs out there. However, the Pandemic caused more than just shortages of PPE supplies. The long-term effects of the supply chain issue we’ve seen are coming out now as repeated back orders on new desktop printers and MFPs as well as the ink and toner cartridge supplies that these machines run off of. HP posted last week on #LinkedIn how the “darling” of their desktop printer and MFP lineup, the LaserJet Pro 400 series, “prints fast” up to 40ppm and links to Office Depot's website where users have to scroll and scroll and scroll just to find the aforementioned LaserJet Pro MFP M428 and the LaserJet Pro M404 printers in that printer family, likely because both models have habitually been out of stock over the last 12+ months with online retailers.

What they also don’t tell you, is that while HP is pushing this HP LaserJet Pro 400 printer family through its dealer channels like it’s going out of style, retailers have also repeatedly been back-ordered on the CF258A and CF258X toner cartridges these machines all use too. To me this means they are so focused on selling new devices in their pivot to adjust to WFH and hybrid scenarios, that they can’t build the ink and toner cartridges these machines rely on fast enough. HP isn’t the only one having supply chain issues with hardware, take a look at Brother USA’s page for their home and small office printer solutions and you’ll see that 2/3 of them listed are not in stock and if you click through to the available retailers they partner with, most of them don’t have stock either.

I’ve got a great example, which I’m working on turning into a case study. A client of mine came to me asking if we could support providing them with the toner for a complete printer hardware refresh their HP dealer was recommending, because their legacy printers used at hundreds of their locations was discontinued at the end of last year by HP. The new printer was the HP LaserJet Pro M430 series – using the CF258A and CF258X cartridges. What the dealer lacked in foresight was that the HP M430 had only about a third of the capabilities of my client’s legacy printers, and the page yield of the M430 high-yield cartridge was a fraction of the yield of the high-yield cartridge their legacy printer used. So, not only would they burn through these M430s faster as they weren’t built for my client’s monthly print volume, but they would also be buying toner 3-4 times as often and would have to deal with supply constraints on the toner cartridges too. I could not see how this was a good solution at all, and instead rallied our own printer hardware sources for the same model of my client’s legacy printer and have been able to keep them using the more efficient printers and cost-effective cartridges for likely another 12-18 months, saving them nearly $4 million dollars in their toner spend.

The moral of the story? Sometimes full hardware refreshes to get the “latest and greatest” turns out to be great for the dealer and the OEM, but unnecessarily costly for the client. Desktop printers and MFPs are flying off the shelves at an unprecedented rate, to support the printing demand for those working from home or hybrid, and all of this goes to show that home office and hybrid work are here to stay. Businesses will need to reimagine how they are going to help their employees achieve a productive WFH or hybrid work life while also staying cost effective with their indirect printer hardware choices and their ink and toner cartridge needs. At the end of the day, businesses who take into consideration supply costs while they are making decisions on new printer hardware are the ones who will future-proof themselves for long term cost avoidance, rather than becoming a cautionary tale of being reactive to the supply needs based on poor hardware model selections.