WHAT THE EXPERTS SAY....


WHY PRINTER PROCUREMENT NEEDS A NEW LANGUAGE


Comment by DEBBIE CALLAGHAN, Marketing Manager at RISO UK L


et’s be honest. Choosing a school bus based on the price of its fuel cap wouldn’t give you the full picture, and the same goes for judging a printer contract based only on one attention-grabbing metric. While headline stats like cost-per-page and lease cost can be helpful metrics, discovering the value that comes with reliability, customer service, technical support, and sustainability creates a different picture of total cost. So where does change need to happen? Maybe we’ve been speaking the wrong language: ‘cost- per-page’, ‘unit price’, ‘lowest bidder’. These terms are


leftovers of a procurement mindset that confuses thrift with value. A mindset that celebrates the immediate gratification of a cheap contract while ignoring the spiralling hidden costs, frustrations, and timesinks that can follow. To be blunt, a low-cost-per-page printer that breaks down every third lesson is not a bargain; it’s a liability with a paper tray. It bleeds money in downtime, in IT support calls, in frustrated staff reprinting worksheets before Ofsted walks in. That’s not just inefficiency, that’s death by a thousand paper jams.


Schools, under pressure to justify every penny, understandably gravitate to the lowest price. Government frameworks often nudge them that way, too. But there’s a growing recognition (even in Whitehall) that this is short-term thinking. It’s procurement by spreadsheet, and it ignores what really matters: total lifecycle value.


If we think in life cycles, that means factoring in the real-world economics of a printer: how often it breaks, how long it lasts, how much energy it guzzles, how many hours of teacher and IT time it wastes and how responsive and proactive the supplier is. A printer that never jams, uses


efficient ink, and doesn’t require a minor engineering degree to operate will save you more than any per-page discount ever could. Still not convinced? Try this: in one school district, the ‘cheap and convenient’ approach led to an epidemic of personal desktop printers, each one a little money pit of expensive cartridges and wasteful usage. Eventually, they centralised on a few high-volume machines and halved their print spend, partly by cutting energy costs. Energy matters, too. With UK electricity prices soaring and schools setting Climate Action Plans, a printer’s carbon footprint has to be included in the procurement conversation. That’s the whole point of shifting the metric from cheap to smart. And then there’s reliability. Not all costs show up on invoices, some arrive as lost lessons, missed deadlines, and frayed tempers. Try printing exam


papers on a Monday morning only to find your “cost-effective” device blinking like a Wi-fi router in distress. That moment (when uptime becomes existential) should be baked into procurement decisions. It’s time for procurement teams to evolve, embrace new metrics: total cost of ownership, uptime and call-out guarantees, time saving features , and (importantly) staff satisfaction scores. Ask vendors how long their machines last before failure. Ask what support is included. Ask how many kilowatt hours their printer consumes per year. Ask how proactive their contract management is. If your tender document doesn’t include those questions and preventive measures to avoid inefficiency, you’re not buying value, you’re buying trouble.


There’s a growing recognition that schools need to look beyond upfront costs. But until business managers and bursars are actively encouraged to prioritise long-term value over short-term savings, and are supported by transparent print partners who help schools get the most from their print solutions - we risk repeating the same costly mistakes.


Let’s stop assuming the cheapest option is always the best one. Let’s ditch the language of false economy and start speaking in terms that reflect how schools actually operate: with constraints, with complexity, and with people who just want the printer to work.


June 2025 www.education-today.co.uk 17


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