By consolidating all the city’s printing and copying needs into one contract, officials hope to save up to $15,000 a year.
Friday, the Warsaw Board of Public Works and Safety was presented with a citywide printer contract with Integrated Technology LLC (ITg) for $104,778 from the city’s IT Governance Committee.
Airport Manager Nick King, who is one of four city employees on the IT Governance Committee, said the contract has been “a long time coming.”
“This contract is going to consolidate all of the city’s printers, copiers, faxes underneath one contract with ITg. We went out and talked to a lot of different companies. ... After the citywide review, we saw a lot of discrepancies in how much different departments were paying in a cost-per-copy,” King said. “We have some departments that were upward of 30-35 cents per color copy because of ink jet printers.”
The ITg contract will be similar to the city’s contract with Wildman for its uniforms and linen in that all of the city will be brought under one contract for printers. King said black-and-white copies will be $0.006 per copy and color copies will be $0.045 per copy.
“So it will just standardized it for all of the departments. However, part of that, to get that cost-per-copy down, we have to go with new printers so that everyone is using the same equipment. We move away from ink jet printers - that’s the largest expenditure in the city, and so this will take us all to a laser monochrome type - some printers will be color, some will be black and white. We worked with all the departments as well to reduce the amount of printers and copiers that were in the departments,” he said.
Using the airport as an example, King said they’ve had the same printers since he started 10 years ago. Under the new contract, they are able to go from five printers to two.
“We made recommendations to the departments, and the total amount for the project is going to be $104,778, and that will replace all the printers, copiers, everything throughout the city. There’s some departments it will also help streamline where they have employees that are having to go in and forward letters that they send out to residents. These new copy machines will actually be able to do that for them and it will reduce the workload on the employees, so there’s going to be time-savings in there as well,” King stated.
He said the IT Governance Committee is estimating between $12,000 to $15,000 a year in savings once the contract is signed.
“That is just going to be seen citywide moving forward, so we’re pretty excited to get this project going,” he said.
Councilwoman Diane Quance asked about an annual maintenance fee, and King said there is none.
“So that’s the reason we chose to go with ITg. There is no annual maintenance fee. All of that is built into the cost per copy, and they only bill us for copies made. So, if my department decides to go on a two-week vacation and nobody prints anything for that two weeks, there’s nothing charged for those two weeks. You are only charged per copy,” he said.
The city will still be responsible for purchasing its own paper.
“All of the maintenance, drums, rollers, toner - all of that is covered underneath that $0.006 per black and white and $0.045 per color. It covers all of those incidentals,” King said.
Mayor Joe Thallemer said, “We’re fortunate that we have a national vendor right here that was able to put all of this together. As Nick suggested, we needed to bring everybody under one roof on this thing. The IT Governance Committee has done a great job. They go above and beyond sometimes and I think this is a case where they did that.”
King said ITg only does a one-year contract, so if the city doesn’t like it after a year, the city can go a different way but still owns the printers.
Quance made the motion to approve the contract, Board member George Clemens seconded the motion and it passed 3-0.