Right-sizing is the unglamorous, highest-ROI move available to any office with more than ten printers. The principle is simple: every device should match the volume and workflow it actually serves. The practice — well, that’s the article.
Step 1: Pull 90 days of real usage data
Don’t guess. Every networked HP device reports page counts; pull the last 90 days and rank devices by daily volume. The bottom quartile is your first target.
Step 2: Map devices to workflow, not org chart
Floorplans lie. A printer assigned to “Accounts” might serve Reception 80% of the time. Spend an afternoon watching foot traffic before you redeploy anything.
Step 3: Consolidate the under-used 20%
Sub-200-page-per-month devices are almost always candidates for consolidation. Retire them; redirect users to the nearest workgroup MFP. Expect 10–15% fleet-wide cost reduction from this step alone.
Step 4: Lock in the saving with a policy
Without policy, fleets re-bloat within 18 months. Mono-by-default printing, duplex-by-default, and a per-user colour quota typically hold 80% of the right-sizing saving permanently.
What good looks like
After right-sizing, the average WA mid-market office prints roughly the same number of pages on roughly 70% of the devices, with materially lower running cost. The remaining 30% of devices get redeployed, refurbished, or returned at lease-end.