51 Ways to Save Money

Times are tough. And you do not need us to tell you that. The signs are all around you. Your budgets have been cut, and you are under pressure to save even more. One way is to cut investments. But that can have long-term negative implications that you would rather not have. So, how do you tighten your belt without sacrificing productivity and quality? This is where your IT setup should come to your aid. You should be able to leverage your IT infrastructure to deliver savings not only in IT itself, but also in other areas of your business. In this issue, we outline 51ways to save money. Some of them lead to direct savings of expenditure. Some of them will help you to defer investments for some more time. And some will help you to improve productivity all around. It is one thing to advise, and yet another to practice what you preach. Let us begin with what we are preaching. Let us keep this introduction brief, saving your time (and also some paper).

Print on both sides of paper

Preview your page

Switch off ACs, LIGHTS

Switch off your PCs

Reduce power consumption by PCs

Outsource

Move data to CD-Rs

Avoid buying floppies

Negotiate better rates

Send memos on e-mail

Do so by inverting a printed page and putting it back in the printing tray. Or, if your printer has a duplexer, select double-sided printing before firing that print command.

A printout gone wrong—missing text or a picture that doesn’t fit—means wastage of paper and time. Save on these by previewing a page before firing a print command. Most office suites and graphics applications have a preview option, which lets you adjust your printouts before printing.

23. Switch off ACs, LIGHTS
Switching off lights, ACs, and other power-hungry devices when you leave your work area will save you a hefty sum.Just for estimates, one ton of air-conditioning requires roughly 3.5 kW of power per hour. Multiply this figure by the tonnage of your corporate AC plant and the number of hours it functions, and you have the total power requirement. Similar calculations can be done for lighting and other power-hungry devices.

Before you leave office for the day, switch off your PCs either manually, or automatically, using control software that comes with most UPSs. A PC typically consumes around 125 W of power, so if you switch off 10 PCs for 10 hours, you save 12.5 kW.

Most PCs come with Advanced Power Management options, thanks to the new ATX power supplies. These can be configured through a system’s BIOS. Newer motherboards also have ACPI (Advanced Configuration and Power Interface), which is automatically detected by Windows during installation. This automatically powers down PCs after detecting a certain period of inactivity.

You can reduce power consumption even when a PC is running. For this, Windows has a Power Management option, which can be accessed from the Control Panel. Here, you can specify the time duration for turning off monitor and hard disks. This does no harm to regular PC usage but saves a lot of energy. A typical 15” monitor consumes about 85 W and a 17” monitor, about 110 W.

This sounds like one of the in mantras of the management kind. But it deserves serious attention when it comes to IT.

Instead of adding fresh people to your staff, can you contract the work to some external agency specializing in it? Potential candidates for outsourcing range from custom development of software to regular maintenance and management of your network and computers. If you choose your outsourcing agency with care, then you could reap significant benefits not only in costs, but also in the quality of the output.

27. Move data to CD-Rs
There was a time when tape storage was the only means of backing up data on your network, but now CD-Rs have become very popular and a decent CD-R costs about Rs 10,000. You can buy one and burn your data on CD-R media, instead of buying more hard drives for it. This will also free up a lot of hard-drive space.

A 20 GB hard drive costs approximately Rs 5000, which makes the per GB cost 250 rupees. While a pack of 10 CD-R media costs about Rs 20 per disk. Since each CD-R can store up to 650 MB, the cost per GB to store data on it would be two CD-R media, or Rs 40.

Save: About Rs 200 for every GB of data you move from your hard drive to a CD-R

28. Avoid buying floppies
In this age of huge data and data storage to match, floppies are archaic. They don’t hold much data and get corrupted easily. If you still need them, format older ones that you’ll find in the various nooks and corners and drawers of your office.

Save: Rs 10–15 per floppy

29. Negotiate better rates
Now is the time to negotiate better rates from your IT contractors and suppliers. Contracts entered into earlier could well have been done in an expansive mood, or could have some slack, otherwise. With the market tightening, everyone is working furiously to reduce the slack in their systems. And there is no reason why you should not benefit from the reduction in slack at your service provider’s end. The first step in this negotiation is to check with another vendor how much he would charge for the same services.

Save: At least 5 percent for most items

30. Send memos on e-mail
Save on paper by sending memos by e-mail rather than printouts. Or better still, put them up on your company’s intranet. It’s also quicker to send a mail, than take a printout, photocopy, and manually distribute them.