The return on investment of replacing five old single-function printers with one MFP
A documented case from a 24-person Madrid consultancy: five aging single-function devices replaced by a single tier-three colour MFP, the friction of the transition, and the five-year ROI the numbers eventually settled at.
Madrid consultancy · 24 staff · two floors · two meeting rooms
The office operated five single-function devices distributed across the floors: two A4 colour laser printers, two A4 mono laser printers, and one entry-level inkjet copier. The fleet had grown organically across eight years and represented the accumulated decisions of three office managers. Each device carried its own toner inventory, its own driver maintenance, and its own occasional service call.
What the office was running
mono
mono
colour
colour
copier
- Five toner SKU inventories to maintain across two suppliers.
- Five sets of drivers deployed across the office's twenty-four workstations and four printers visible in the print menu.
- Annual service spend roughly €1,400 across the fleet, billed by callout rather than contract.
- Aging mono devices producing visible quality drift; one colour printer running on partial cyan from a refilled cartridge.
- Roughly forty minutes a week of staff time spent on printer-related issues, paper jams, and queue rebuilds.
What the office moved to
- Four toner cartridges in a single bundled-supply contract from one dealer.
- One device discovered through directory service; one driver deployment via group policy.
- Service-contract CPP covering parts, labour, scheduled maintenance, and remote diagnostics on a 24-hour SLA.
- Consistent colour output across both office floors with calibrated profile applied at install.
- Staff time spent on printer issues dropped to roughly seven minutes a week.
The five-year ROI calculation
Four issues that surfaced during the migration
- Driver deployment took longer than budgeted. The IT consultant scheduled for a half-day install ended up returning twice to chase laptop-side driver-store cache issues. Net overrun: €260 in additional contractor time.
- Staff resistance to the secure-release queue. The new device's hold-and-release print queue added a four-second delay to print jobs. Two staff members logged complaints in the first week; the office manager addressed it by extending the hold timeout to fifteen seconds and adding a "rush print" exception for partner-level urgent jobs.
- Floor-plate placement constraint. The A3 device weighed 75 kg and required a relocation of one filing cabinet to fit through the doorway. Roughly half a day of staff time absorbed during install day.
- One old mono printer reactivated. The legal-document workflow turned out to depend on a specific mono printer's pre-printed letterhead tray. The mono printer stayed in service for a further three months until letterhead workflow was migrated to the new device's bypass tray. Soft cost of the parallel running period: €180 in toner and service.
The outcome · what the books showed at year three
The consolidation paid back faster than projected
The projected payback of eighteen months landed at fourteen months. The difference came from two sources the original model under-counted: the staff-time-on-printers line dropped further than expected once the new device's reliability removed the weekly micro-interruptions, and the toner supply chain produced a small additional saving when the dealer added cyan, magenta, yellow, and black to a single quarterly shipment rather than the five separate replenishment cycles of the previous fleet.
The wider lesson the consultancy drew was that single-function device consolidation projects tend to under-promise on the soft-cost side because staff time savings are difficult to project before the change happens. The hard-cost lines — toner, electricity, paper — are visible from day one in the model. The soft-cost lines — staff hours, IT support, driver maintenance — show up in retrospect once the new workflow stabilises, and they routinely add 18 to 28 percent on top of the projected hard-cost savings.