Reduction in long term costs

The cost savings from a Cutter system come from a number of sources. Some customers are heavily into recycling and want to reduce capital expenditure whilst others seek to maximise the benefits in energy and running costs (principal amongst the latter is local management and maintenance).

There isn't a one-size-fits-all approach to this so you can't expect to delve into this page and come out with hard figures relevant directly to your own environment but we hope to give you enough to get you started.

We can look at

  • energy costs
  • equipment costs
  • maintenance and management costs
  • less quantifiable benefits
and you can choose for yourself which work best for you.

Energy Costs

Energy first then: if you look at 'Energy savings and environmental benefits' you will find that, although hedged around with caveats (and you should read them) a crude calculation of energy savings for a 400-desktop Cutter system produces a headline figure of some £28,000 a year savings in electricity costs. Much depends on what you pay for energy, how you use the systems and factors like the use of air conditioning. We aren't saying you will achieve this, simply that a simple calculation produces that figure to play with. That figure alone is unlikely to sway you but it's a nice-to-have item to put on the spreadsheet.

Equipment Costs

Equipment costs will vary depending on the nature of the desktop device you choose - and that will have a minor feed-through into management issues but we can't really put a figure on the latter.

If you recycle old PCs you will have to gut and clean them first, which won't be free of cost, and the old hard drives, CD/DVD drives etc will have to be scrapped (which costs money too now). If you buy new desktop devices the cost will be very dependent on manufacturer, special offers and whatever other commercial factors come into play. As you probably know, switching between capital expenditure (capex) and leasing (opex) may allow you to move the costs around the budget areas and might have some tax implications. That's for your financial wizards to determine, please don't ask us about it!

Depending on the choice of desktop device there may be licensing costs to consider, both for the device itself and of course also for the applications you are using. We can probably give some help with estimating licensing figures but that's not a promise, we have to look on a case-by-case basis. Some rule-of-thumb figures for a starting point might be - recycling old PCs, £100/desktop - built-for-purpose desktop devices, £250/desktop plus on top of that, application software licences (you may well already have these)

When calculating overall equipment costs remember that you are expecting to get something like ten years out of these devices rather than the typical 3-4 years of a traditional PC or laptop (the latter being sometimes even shorter-lived).

On an annualised basis the figures are typically very appealing, coming out anything between a tenth and half of the traditional PC devices.

Maintenance and Management Costs

Maintenance and management costs are where one of the biggest savings comes in but sadly for us, few organisations cost this accurately and it gets absorbed in general staffing costs.

Our experience has been that most organisations have to allocate around one full-time technician per four hundred traditional PC devices, so the real cost of the device over (say) three years is not only its purchase price, but also about 0.75% of the fully-costed technician - as a rough rule that doubles its equivalent capital price or more. By comparison, a single technician should be able (in our experience) to manage a Cutter system comprising several thousand desktops. Alternatively management can be outsourced to a specialist supplier like ourselves, with the day-to-day management of the desktop devices themselves becoming almost a janitorial job and requiring at most very basic training.

The on-costs of systems requiring regular updating and management are very hard to measure. If a member of staff loses 15 minutes in a day due to PC-related issues very few organisations have a way of accounting for that despite it being a real cost. Experience shows us that the alternative devices tend to have noticeably less downtime than most workplace PCs, despite the trend in recent years for better availability which alleviates the loss of productivity.

Less Quantifiable Benefits

Less quantifiable benefits are inevitably going to sound rather woolly, but they remain worth discussing. In general we find that users come to relish the reliability and convenience of easily managed desktops, perhaps coupled with the ability to leave sessions open, move from desk to desk or the workplace to home. Ease of use and convenience lead to lower levels of stress and better productivity. The ability (in some environments) to work on the same desktop from home proves to be very popular and allows people to shift their work patterns better to suit themselves or to avoid peak traffic times whilst still meeting deadlines.