Buying tips: how to buy a new fax/MFP
When do I replace the inkjet?
Why not buy a Superstore fax/MFP?
Retail vs. commercial
How do I reduce costs?
LED Printhead verses Laser Printhead
What's new!
When do I replace the inkjet?
The answer is when it is right for you and your business application. All companies are different. Before upgrading any fax you must check to see if it makes financial sense. It all breaks down to 4 major areas: usage, telephone distance, archiving/ copying and application
APPLICATION: Do I need to do more than fax? If so you might need an MFP (multifunctional printer), that prints, copies, scans in addition to faxing.
USAGE: This is simply how much is your fax being used. Keep your activity journals (send/receive) for 3-6 months, account for any busy season or slow season and try to get an average send page volume and receive page volume. Keep an eye on page count, not location sent to. The average fax is 3-6 pages, so if you are+ sending to 5 locations per day, the pages sent are 15-30 pages per day. Once you have an average, go on to the next area.
TELEPHONE DISTANCE: Check your journals and find out the percentage of long distance calls versus local. Also highlight any international calls. Make sure that your fax, like your phone, is getting good long distance telephone rates. Try and get an average cost per minute for long distance.
ARCHIVING/COPYING: Do all incoming faxes have to be photocopied? If so who does this job? Get an average of their hourly worth. A good rule of thumb is $12.00 an hour for employees, including benefits. This could be low in your company, like if the president is making the copy.
Before we move to application, let's figure our what we have. We should know the number of pages sent and received per day: local, long distance and international. How many pages are copied and who copies them. Get an average hourly cost:
Example
SENDING: 20 Pages
local 10 pages long distance. The long distance should be calculated by number
of pages times average rate per minute. Each page will take an average of one
minute, so it looks like: 10 Pages x $.20 x 1 minute=$2.00. Times this by a
business month of 21 days, it equals $42.00. This is your long distance
sending.
RECEIVING: First
figure the number of pages received, in this case 30 page a day. The average
cost of fax paper is $.04 per copy, so the daily cost is $1.20, and the monthly
cost is $25.20. Next figure the amount of pages that are copied, lets assume
all 30 are copied. The copy cost is $.02 per copy, or $.60 per day or $12.60
per month. Next figure the labor to copy. One study figured it took three
minutes to make one copy. Lets' be more conservative and assume one minute. The
average labor rate (with benefits) is $10.00 per hour. Now let's figure out the
labor rate. 30 copies times one minute is 30 minutes. 30 minutes is .5 of one hour. The equation reads: 10.00 x .5= $5.00 x 21 business days, equals $105.00
in labor for one month.
Let's see what we have:
Sending
costs = $42.00 per month
Receiving
costs and paper = $25.20 per month
Copying = $12.60
per month
Labor=$105.00
per month.
The total monthly costs are $184.80 per month or $2218.00 per year.
What are the savings with a new fax/MFP?
The first thing
to look at is sending. Commercial plain paper fax sends pages at 14.4Kbps to
33.6Kbps. Let us assume just a 33.6Kbps modem - the compression on these
commercial units are MMR (Modified Modified Read) or JBIG. – this could
be 40% faster than your current fax. That’s a minimum 40% savings or the
equivalent of your phone bill going from $42.00 To $25.00. Another savings is "dual-access."
This enables you to send while you are receiving and send while you are sending
to another location. This feature with quick scan places the documents in
short-term memory and gives the original back to the sender within 3-6 seconds
each. This frees up the sender to do another job. This is a soft savings that
is hard to put numbers on. Other features like "Delay Send’ and
"Broadcast" save the operator a lot of time. The benefits of extra
employee time can be huge - more time to talk with customers or just more time
to do the job they were hired for.
Your savings on receiving are easier to figure out. The cost of a commercial fax to make a copy is $.02-$.03 per copy. Find the yield of the toner/drum and the price, divide the price of the toner/drum into the yield, this gives you a cost per copy. Most commercial units are $.03 or less.
Some toners come as “kits”, that means the drum is included with the toner. Most HP printers use this method, it is convenient, but tends to cost a littler more per copy.
APPLICATION: International traffic, local traffic, single-users, multiple users, photograph sending and receiving, letter/legal pages - All these applications affect your fax. International sending could use batch transmission
Ok, so I need a new fax/MFP. Why not buy a Superstore fax/MFP?
Great question - The answer is you should if your volume is going to be less than 10 pages sent or received per day. Retail fax units are less expensive for the same re asons that most other products are less expensive than each other: reduced features. Let me explain some differences.
Retail vs. commercial units
SPEED: Many store-bought units use just MMR compression and 14.4Kbps speed. This is at least 40%-50% slower than the JBIG compression coding used in commercial units. If there is heavy long distance, or just heavy traffic, a 33.6Kbps modem should also be considered. FYI-fax equipment in the U.S. is usually set at 28.8Kbps, even though we all brag about a 33.6Kbps modem.
SIZE SCANNED: Commercial units scan 8.5" across or the width of a page. Retail units scan 8.2" across so be careful with diagrams or drawings.
CHASSIS: Commercial units have a metal chassis to prevent flexing of the unit. When a unit FLEXES, jams can occur. Store bought units have no chassis. Check out the weight of an OKIFAX and any store bought laser unit. The OKIFAX will weigh twice as much.
MODULAR EQUIPMENT: Commercial units should have the ability to grow with your business. So if your business grows in year two, you only spend $200.00 for a modem or memory, instead of another retail machine. Commercial units can have modems, extra cassettes, memory and PC interfaces added at any time.
PC PROGRAMMING: Most commercial fax units can allow a user on a PC to program the numbers or parameters on their PC, then just input into the fax. Besides being a great time saver, it is also helpful when the user upgrades or needs service on their fax. These numbers can be brought back into the PC and stored, so no new programming needs to be done.
EQUIPMENT LIFE: Heavily used store bought units do not hold up over time They use inexpensive nylon gears that wear with heavy usage. We know, we service them.
SERVICE: This is
always something to be concerned about. What if my fax unit stops working? Any
dollar savings that you had by buying a store-bought unit is gone on the first
service call. In some cases because of the low cost of the unit, companies
elect to dispose of the fax due to the low original cost. Buying a fax every 2
years will be more expensive than buying a modular commercial fax and keeping
it 5-7 years. Servicing store-bought units can be a hassle. Calling a foreign
country may not be what you want to do. Shipping a unit off to be serviced
leaves your company without a fax - usually not acceptable. KM Data, Inc. offers
IMMEDIATE FREE PLAIN PAPER LOANERS, usually within 3 hours, delivered to your
location.
Another service issue is PHONE LINE PROBLEMS. 25% Of service calls are due to poor phone line connections. Shipping a unit off, or bringing it into a store will not help this problem. Commercial fax units should have programmable phone line adjustments to help get around a telephone problem. Many commercial units offers 4 different phone line conditioners per auto dial location.
Fax equipment may also appear broken, when there is nothing wrong with it. Operator error can be expensive. At least 30% of service calls are due, in some part, to human error. Toner spills, incorrect paper loaded in tray, incorrect telephone fax numbers and removed telephone lines are at the top of our service report lists. All these items require a tech to visit the fax, causing a billable charge.
Laptop users seem to have a “thing” against fax machines. Maybe that is a little strong but we have 2-3 service calls a week where a person using a laptop will unplug the fax to use their laptop and not place the jack back into the correct slot. It sounds like a minor issue, but we collect about $350.00 per month in labor, just because the jack is in the wrong slot.
Sometimes companies moving from a low end fax into a mid to high end plain paper fax do not consider a service agreement because "the old fax never broke". Plain paper fax machines are closer to copiers than they are to a thermal fax or printer. Plain paper commercial fax units should be serviced by a technician every 6 months. During this preventive maintenance (PM) call, the feed rollers should be cleaned, LED head cleaned, toner vacuumed out of drum area, separator rubber cleaned and scanner dusted. Another reason for a service agreement is to receive manufacturer updates. - all manufacturers make changes to equipment during the life of that equipment. These changes can be in the form of updates on feed rollers to firmware changes to enhance equipment function. A company with a service agreement gets these updates automatically and free. It is part of the service agreement.
CONSUMABLES: A very important consideration is cost per copy. Thermal transfer fax is $.05-$.18 per copy. Inkjet fax is $.05-.09 per copy Laser LED fax is $.02-.07 per copy. Commercial cost per copy is around $.02. If you are planning on keeping your fax for 5 years, a difference of $.05 on consumables will equal $3150.00 more in supply costs! This is based on 50 pages/day over 5 years. If you receive more than 15 pages per day, look at an LED/Laser fax.
Other Areas to Consider
When considering
buying a fax, remember to consider the most expensive part of faxing - THE
USER. The person operating the fax is by far the most expensive part of faxing.
Think about it: the fax machine’s cost is handled by your Accounting Dept and
the unit is depreciated in some manner. Phone costs can be controlled with
discount long distance and supply costs can be kept to 2 cents per copy. The
user is the one area that can go up in price. For example, if your salespeople,
engineers and executive secretaries (not to mention the President of the
company) are standing by the fax waiting and waiting for his/her important and
sensitive document to send, how much is the fax machine worth now?
How do I reduce my user cost?
MEMORY = Have enough memory to scan all pages into the fax unit first. The fax unit should have at least 100 pages* of memory.
DUAL ACCESS = Be able to send into memory while you are receiving. This enables the user to get the pages back in their hands and go on with their job.
TCR = transmit confirmation is very important. Look for equipment that puts a copy of the first page sent right onto the TCR report, this tells you what was sent in addition to all the other information that you would normally need.
"*" = This little fellow will be on every fax brochure ever printed. In this case it shows up by the "100 pages of memory" in the paragraph above. All fax units use the same standard for testing speed sent, toner/drum consumption, and memory. This standard is now called the UTI-1 TEST CHART. This chart is about a 5% background page. The good news is that all fax companies use this chart. The bad news is that it is a small amount of print on a page. A good rule of thumb is to cut the numbers in half: The 100 pages of memory are really 50. While we are on the subject, watch out for the transmission speeds of fax units. The 6-second transmissions are not really 6 seconds. Let me explain: a 14.4bps fax unit has a first page handshake of 10 seconds, before page one is sent. The 6 second speed is tested between like units, using the UTI-1 TEST CHART, without counting handshake.
Battery
Backup
Page memory is something to be careful about. Some fax units allocate a
percentage of memory for send and receive. The best bet is to look for a fax
that lets you use 100% of its memory the way you need it. All commercial page
memory should be protected with battery backup. Consider this example: your fax
unit runs out of paper over the weekend, and your business has a power outage.
All stored pages are lost and the sending fax units have already told their
users that the pages were received successfully.
Weight
This is a favorite of our service people. Pick the unit up! The store bought
units weigh 30-40% less than the quality commercial units. This ties into some
areas that were mentioned earlier: chassis sturdiness and materials used.
Some commercial fax units have the ability to adjust the individual features of each speed-dial or dialed number. Commercial fax units can adjust echo suppression, attenuation, error criterion and time-out values. This becomes very important with international calls or calls going to areas with poor phone line quality. Commercial faxes error criterion is an excellent feature, it enables the user to allow different percentages of errors before dropping the phone line or modem speed. In some cases increasing error acceptance will improve fax traffic without hurting copy quality.
LED Printhead verses Laser Printhead
WHAT IS AN LED?
LED stands for Light-Emitting Diode. The LED printing process is
identical to laser with one exception. Instead of the single light source used
in laser printing techniques, a stationary LED bar consisting of an array of
1728 lights is used. Light emitted from the LED array electrically charges the
drum one entire line at a time.
LED |
||
ADVANTAGES |
DISADVANTAGES |
|
Low cost per
copy (< 2 cents) |
None |
|
LASER |
||
ADVANTAGES |
DISADVANTAGES |
|
Widely utilized Good cost per copy (3.1 cents) Excellent image quality Permanent image No curling/fading |
Higher initial cost Many moving parts 80's technology Costly to maintain Engineer must clean |
|
All Okifax LED heads have a full 5-year warranty!
WHATS NEW!
Coding methods: In addition to MH, MR and MMR coding, a new standard is now out called JBIG and JPEG. JBIG is about 20-30% faster than MMR, while JPEG can be as must as 80%. This, like any other coding, needs the JBIG/JPEG on each side to work. This is usually used with 33.6Kbps modems.
Internet fax: The benefits to this are pretty clear - greatly reduced telephone costs. This feature lets a fax send and convert the message to an email. This technology is very handy with all the mobile and PAD users around. Most commercial fax now offer this feature, and it should be considered when buying a fax.
LAN connection: Many fax units also offer LAN connection, again a great tool for the office that shares a device or devices. Hardest thing about this is getting the users to actually use the LAN/FAX interface. People tend to like the idea of walking up to a fax and sending their pages.
Flatbed scanner: This is a great feature if you have a need to fax or copy a book or something that would normally not go through an automatic document feeder (ADF). This unit is most likely a multifunctional device, so you might be able to fax, copy, print and scan from your PC or LAN. You will pay more for this type device, so make sure you have the application for it. Multifunctional devices are great for small office environments, try and have some backup devices incase the equipment fails, you would hate to be without a fax, copier and printer.
Color fax: This is a question we are always asked.
Yes it is here!. With the new 33.6Kbps speeds and new color
compressions (V.30E) now being used, it make sense to fax with color. Color faxing is still expensive and
will be used in more vertical markets, like real estate or marketing.
We hope this information is helpful. Remember, a Facsimile machine should be a
SAVINGS to a company. Making the correct choice from the start will increase
your companies productivity and reduce your costs.
Please feel free to call us at KM Data, Inc. We have over 20 years of facsimile
applications to share. Let us help you reduce your company's communications
costs. Call us at (919)387-5900, fax (919)387-3877, or rudolph@kmdata.com.
