Topic: Misc - Applying Technology for Cost Savings

Was listening to a Businessweek podcast today about companies that have done well in customer service.
An interesting example quoted was BMW. They installed wireless access in their service centres as a benefit to customers who were bringing in their cars for service.
What they found is that this had the result of DECREASING demand for loaner cars. Drivers, instead of asking for a spare car (which is expensive for BMW to provide) were staying in the working area getting work done from their laptops over the internet connection.
So by improving customer service, BMW inadvertently saved costs.

It really does not cost very much to provide wireless internet access to customers in your waiting room.

Topic: Electricity & Consumables

Saving electricity - when the office is dark at night, and all the employees are at home, some devices should be powered off completely.  The fax machine and server hosting the files employees will access from home to work with can stay on.  But PCs, Printers, Copiers should all be turned off.

At the wall switch.

That's because these devices continue to suck up energy while they run in standby mode.  Ideally, you'll have a circuit running throughout the office from which devices that should go totally dead after hours.  Then just trip the single switch or breaker or isolator that controls this circuit, and you don't have to worry about the trickle current drain from all the devices on this circuit.

In reality, people will probably rely on power strips to turn off a group of devices, and it's left to the individual to remember to turn off their devices before leaving the office.  

There's also the worry that regular powering on and off electronic devices is going to send lots of little current surges through the circuits, which may end up weakening them, or making them more predisposed to failure.

There's a free power management tool for desktop PCs  on hp.com that I've not tried yet - but is supposed to provide better control and power savings than the power applet that comes with XP/Vista.  Will have to look at this and see if it's of help.

On the printing side, there's INSTANT ON technology, which makes it possible for printers to enter deep-sleep (ie very low power consumption mode) when not in use, and then rapidly warm up to handle printing jobs when the spoolers start kicking in.  

Topic: Communications

Save on Bandwidth when sending large attachments by eMail.

Big files take longer to send out from your email server, and take up more disk space.  Many countries have regulations about how long email has to archived, so the consumed disk space will be around for a while, which is quite an opportunity cost.

It's getting more common to send large powerpoint files, graphics, brochures, videos.

There are 2 approaches to reducing attachment file size:

1. Compress files

2. Send a link instead of the files themselves

For Approach 1:

Office 2007 has a save to pdf feature ( a free download from Microsoft's website).  One of the options when stating file name to save to is on compression.  If you take the high compression setting, images you've embedded into your document would not look as nice, but your overall file size can be dramatically decreased.  Test this out on a document by document basis, though, as it's possible for some PDF versions to end up larger in file size than the original Winword or Powerpoint file.  Note also that if you're zipping up files to send out, the zip file can be larger than the originals if your originals are mostly images or videos or some already highly compressed format.  

For Approach 2:

There are an increasing number of services that let you store files on the internet - some are paid services, some free.  Skydrive from Microsoft is free, and a good way to share out large files.  HP's upline (not yet available in APJ) is a fee based service that let's you share out specific files in your online archive.   Photos from a decent megapixel camera can easily range from 1-2M each.  Best to upload these to Flickr or Picasa, and share out the relevant photos with your audience.

Communicating with your customers - use the web.  

Whether for tech support or provide providing product information, there's little excuse to start a simple site and grow it from there. Many businesses are building their starting-out sites on wordpress, and linking to storage space they've rented to host files and manuals available for download.  Link in maps to your "contact us" page - this is easily done for free from live or google maps.  Link in photos of products or places - again easily done for free with photo sharing sites. This is stuff teenagers with no formal programming knowledge are doing with their sites.  There's no excuse for any self respecting business to not do the same.   

Topic: Managing your PCs

It's common to speak to end-users with PCs that are just 6 months old, who will tell you that their PCs seem to be running much more slowly than when they were brand new.  

Wouldn't it be wonderful to be able to do an easy overhaul of the OS to such systems, to make them run like new again, with not too much effort?

The answer is in 3 parts:

-Make a disk image of the perfect setup - base OS, needed apps, configs, patches (topic of a post in itself)

-Have a scheme to keep Data Files in a few, logical places so it's easy to backup only the data, and to restore the data after a full disk restore.

-Keep app configs simple by having more of your stuff on the web (yes, there are security risks to this, but it's possible to manage this with sensible precautions).  For example, keep bookmarks on the web using Google Toolbar.  Consider using GMail, accessing it from an IMAP client so you can get reliable offline access.  Use Zoho or Docs for less critical documents that you don't mind storing on the web, or want to share with others.

Free Training - there are good resources on the web for free online training on using common productivity applications.  A good example is HP's online learning centre (www.hp.com/apac/onlinecourses)

System Cleanup - less drastic than doing an entire OS overhaul - would be running a few utilities on a regular basis to keep the OS in good shape.  I like Glary Utilities.  Disk Cleanup (with removal of old system restore points) is good.  I use the vista provided defragger, but there are supposed to be some good freeware alternatives around.  

PC Health Scans - for HP commercial PCs and Pavilon, there's Instant Support.  It's become very good in it's latest incarnation, and well worth making use of.  There's a local version of diagnostics called HP Health Check. It runs locally, and connects to the web to get info on the latest known issues and updates.  This is something end-users can run for themselves, and most of the time, the recommended actions are things end users can do for them selves. (though you man want to tell them not to accept BIOS updates as these could potentially cripple the PCs if not done correctly)

Take off unnecessary loads from the PC.

Driving with bricks in the boot, or with lead plates bolted onto the engine as going to degrate the performance of even the most powerful sports car.

Something similar happens with PCs.  It's generally the same OS, packed with lots of features for media sharing, serving out folders, files & printers, supporting smart cards - lots of things that are really excess baggage for the general PC user.  

Some of the things to remove are obvious.  (unused apps in Control Panel>Add/Remove Programs).  Some things are less so (like disabling Aero).

Topic: Printing

Already have an AIO or MFP? Scan hardcopy documents and share these out on your network or send these by email instead of making multiple copies and sending out via courier or snail mail.  This will save postage too.  

Print duplex.  Don't allow people to do otherwise.  It should be relatively simple to set up duplexing as the default mode either on the printer itself, or on a print-server.  

Print in Econo Mode - whether Ink or Laser, set this as default.  In most cases, econo mode produces perfectly usable printouts.  Save the high quality for final versions that are being sent to customers to win business or secure funding.  

Think about using eMail to do mass mailings.  This means you have to do the work to build up a simple CRM and get customer permission to send them eDMs (direct mailers).  But it's worth it from the cost perspective.  And later, you could get very clever about how you target your emails based on the information you've captured on your customers.  

Incoming Fax - it's a very common problem fax-spam, which wastes paper and ink/toner.

Here's a suggestion.  Keep your current fax machine for sending hardcopies only.  Office workers are already expert at sending out hardcopy documents via fax, so we should leave that be.  But for incoming faxes, have another line and setup an old PC or notebook that has built in Modem.  Set up the free MS fax capability that's bundled with Windows OSes since Windows for Workgroups 3.11 (that was a LONG time ago).  This way, incoming faxes are not automatically printed out.  People get to view new faxes onscreen, delete the spam, and either print out or forward by eMail to the recipient.  

Topic: Security

When sending out sensitive email - watch out because Electronic Documents because these can very easily spread like wildfire.

Encryption in containers before sending sensitive spreadsheets, documents, presentations out via email is a good idea.  I recommend TrueCrypt - this is freeware, and has worked well for me in Windows (including vista) and Linux.  

If your notebook comes with free utilities/capabilities to secure your data, now is a good time to turn them on.  Difficult economic times usually see a rise in theft, and notebooks are a particularly tempting target.  A lost notebook means time spent mitigating the implications of lost data that you don't want to see falling into the wrong hands.  This could be an even bigger time/cost sucker-upper than that of replacing the physical hardware and restoring your last backup. I recommend turning on HDD encryption, which is becoming available on many models of notebook today.

Bite the bullet and take up a more secure OS.

Buying a new PC and wanting to downgrade the OS to XP from Vista?

That'll provide your users a faster and more familiar desktop environment.  But you WILL be compromising on security.

I recommend you take Vista, but strip off the unnecessary baggage (eg eye candy, server 

service, crapware, etc) and you'll have something much better than XP, that performs just as well.  And there's always the MacOS option if you're so inclined (but this usually means you need to buy new apps if you're a confirmed MS Office user)

For older PCs, where the OS is already in an unstable state - consider a move to Linux.  It's free. It's stable (especially on older platforms built with standard chipsets).  There aren't many viruses written for it.  There are a good many programs that can take the place of what you were using on Win95, 98, ME or whatever was installed on that old PC (I hope it wasn't Windows 3.1x or DOS)

I will create another post later on essential desktop software for Linux PCs.

If the need for cost savings has driven you to give up running your own eMail servers, and instead take up service from the likes of Google Office, be careful of permissions.  

It's possible that you're opening up your calendar to anyone who knows how to type in 

the right words into a Google search.

Thanks for coming by to help

Hi, Folks.  Thanks so much for responding to my email and coming over to this site to help.

I've created a few posts, each for an area of cost saving for IT users (applicable mostly to small, medium sized organisations, but possibly helpful to large size companies).  

Would appreciate your critiquing the points I've got in there, and adding your own via comments.

I'm also keeping the permissions light, so that you can add posts for new areas of cost savings I have not thought of yet.

The objective of this site is to tap on our collective wisdom and experience to gather content that will be used in presentations, publications, conversations that we can offer IT managers and End-Users of IT - whether businesses, schools, non-profit organisations.  

Thanks for participating!