If you work in the print and imaging industry, you've probably heard a lot about TCO. The term TCO gets bounced around quite a bit, and can often times mean different things to different people. At gap intelligence,TCO stands for Total Cost of Ownership, our gapTCO Tool allows users to put together real scenarios to help potential buyers determine what they can expect to spend and save over the lifetime of their printer or copier. There are a lot of factors that can impact TCO and just because a printer has the lowest hardware investment up front, doesn’t necessarily mean it has the lowest TCO long term.
Let’s start with the basics TCO = Hardware + Consumables + Accessories + Services
What can impact TCO?
You quickly realize that after purchasing a printer, your initial hardware investment will only get you so far and you will need to think outside of what is included in the box. Much like a car needs to be supplied with fuel to be of any use, printers need consumables like inks, toners, drums, and maintenance items to print.How much you print and how you print (like how much of the page is covered when you are printing) will determine how often you need to replace a printer’s consumables. Every consumable replacement steadily increases the lifetime TCO.
Take these two printers for example, they have the exact same price on the manufacturers' websites, but two very different Total Costs of Ownership as a result of differing factors in their printing enviorment, their consumable yields, and costs. Consumables yields will determine how often these need to be replaced within a given period of time and printing environment.
TCO can get even more complicated when you start to take into account any additional accessories, warranties, and paper costs, oh my! Now you are probably thinking, where do all these numbers come from to calculate a device’s true TCO. Sure, you could manually search them out one by one, identifying all of the required consumables, any desired extras whipping out the calculator or excel sheet and getting to work. But how reliable is the data you find in your google search, how often do these prices change, and how much of a time investment would be required for that one device alone, let alone a full TCO comparison?
gapTCO. True Cost, Real Time
That’s where gap intelligence comes in. Our foundation is in print and imaging. Our gapTCO tool leverages data from our Print and Supplies categories and combines them into a simple cloud based solution that allows you to quickly and easily conduct head-to-head product comparisons for copier and printer based devices, as well as analyze the true total cost of ownership for an unlimited number of products over a period of time.
If it sounds easy, that’s because it is. (If you require further convincing, check out my previous blog gapTCO: So Easy a Sales Person Could Use It). Our gapTCO tool provides users with the most up-to-date pricing and product specification information putting all of the data you need to make an informed decision at your fingertips. Don’t know what consumables a printer requires or what they cost? Not sure how to work out the usage based cost per page in a given printing environment, The gapTCO tool does. Want to incorporate your own price catalogue into the tool to merge gap’s GFD (good freakin' data) with your portfolio pricing? No problem.
But Wait, There's More
The gapTCO tool can easily account for those impactful variables when calculating TCO, and the best part is that theamazing data doesn’t have to just live its life in gapTCO. gapTCO users are free to access that information both in Excel and PDF formats. And as of March 15th 2017, gapTCO has a refreshed look! The new and improved gapTCO has the same recognizable layout and user friendly workflow, leveraging gap intelligence's grade A GFD, but users can now look forward to:
Updated Aesthetics – Cleaner design, new colors, modernized welcome screen
Efficient Use of Screen Space – Tools now utilize more of the viewable screen area
Responsive Design – Adaptive display for optimal viewing on a wider range of screen sizes and resolutions
Whether you are a sales professional engaged in a transactional deal or a marketing team responsible for ensuring that your product is positioned effectively against the competition, gapTCO Pro is the tool for you. Interested in learning more? Drop us a line at tco@gapintelligence.com
