Want to save €62,000 in electricity and software costs?

I attended a seminar last week organised by the National College of Ireland in the IFSC entitled ‘Intelligent Cost Cutting’, where my client, Jon Mulligan of software company Openplain, made a presentation outlining simple measures that businesses can use to easily cut up to €62,000 in costs for a medium-sized business.

Openplain supply software that allows companies to analyse their computer usage. They can monitor what software companies do and don’t use, what hardware is used and how often, and can even tell you what websites employees use, including social networking sites. They monitor 10,000 users in Ireland and 80,000 overall worldwide, so they have a significant rare insight into our working habits.

As well as the obvious boosts to productivity that results from employees knowing their computer usage is being monitored, their Officemetrics software allows companies to save money by telling them which software they don’t use and, therefore, can get rid of.

Jon said that when companies are attempting to reduce costs, instead of making sweeping cuts, such as staff redundancies, there are simple measures that can save businesses thousands of euro. Two of the biggest culprits are in relation to IT – companies need to turn off their computers and stop buying software they don’t use.

Computer Usage

Openplain’s software has found that almost two thirds of Irish workers needlessly leave their computers on when they leave the office. This results in a huge wast of electricity and, of course, much higher electricity bills – not to mention the untold damage to the environment caused by all this extra carbon be pumped into the atmosphere.

On average a desktop computer uses 1750 kWh of electricity per annum, this is 13 times the power use of the average domestic oven or 4.5 times the average fridge freezer – a huge amount of electricity. What a waste.

With Irish electricity charges some of the highest in the world, ESB charges 14.8c per kWh, which means the cost of running each computer is €259 per year. Whereas if they were turned off when staff leave the office it should only cost €50 per year. This is an average saving of €20,000 for a medium-size company of 100 people, which can be achieved just by turning off a switch.

Buying Too Much Software

In tracking software usage Openplain has found that most companies only use 70% of the software that they have bought. This is a huge over subscription, which costs businesses thousands of euro each year in software licences.

Garnter research show that the average software expenditure in medium and large sized companies is over €1,400 per employee. By removing all unused software companies could make savings of €420 per employee. That equates to a cost saving of €42,000 per annum for a company with 100 staff.

And?

That’s a saving of €62,000 per year for medium size business just by turning of computers when they are not in use and not paying for software that that you don’t use. It seems obvious and you’d think businesses would do this anyway. But, it seems that when people aren’t paying for electricity they don’t seem to care who is. I had an old boss at a PR company in London who used to go around the office turning them off a night, I thought he was being pedantic, but now I work for myself I can see myself doing that in few years too.

The over subscription of software seems to come from companies fearing an audit of software licenses by companies like Microsoft who appearing to clamping down on licence evaders as a way of generating extra revenue to compensate for other areas when it is dropping. But why have 50 licences for a software that only 5 people use at any one time. Simply logic really.

At a time when companies look to reduce staff as the easiest way to cut costs , €62,000 is the equivalent to two junior members of staff, or one senior staff member, which would you have? So turn off and wise up.

ENDS

Here’s some background on Openplain

Openplain is a privately held Irish company based in the International Financial Services Centre (IFSC). Founded in 2006, with the support of Enterprise Ireland and the AIB Seed Capital Fund, it is the only Irish provider of IT software to track and analyse employee productivity and computer activity.

Openplain is an award winning Irish IT company: in 2008 the company was the winner of InterTradeIreland’s All-Ireland Seedcorn Business Competition; in 2007 it won first prize at the Docklands Innovation Park Awards.

It currently has 80,000 users of its software in 89 countries including the USA, Japan, Brazil, Russia, China, UK and 10,000 in Ireland alone.

Openplain’s two main products are OfficeMetrics, which tracks employee performance and productivity through computer usage, and also LicenseMetrics, which analyses a company’s usage of software and licensing. For more details please see: http://www.openplain.com, http://www.officemetrics.com

Business, Latest news and features, Openplain | Simon Palmer | 24/11/2009 5:14 pm