Oft-cited studies have indicated that the costs of corporate printing amount to roughly 3% of an organization’s annual revenue. Many organizations have adopted that figure as a kind of yardstick to determine whether or not their own print budget is getting out of hand. As long as their print spending is pretty much in line with that, they tend to stick with their existing corporate print solutions and the status quo.
At PrinterLogic, by nature we tend to think outside the box. Which is why we’ve challenged this way of approaching corporate print management. Just because organizations generally spend 3% of their annual revenue on printing doesn’t mean your organization has to spend that much. There are effective ways to clamp down on runaway corporate print costs that you might not be putting into practice — or even be aware of.
Here’s what you might call a “printing efficiency checklist” that applies to most corporate print solutions and print environments:
Are you proactively curbing waste? A major printer manufacturer found that, on average, 17% of all print output was considered waste — things like long email signatures that spill over to another printed page, website printouts that stamp the URL at the bottom of an otherwise blank page, or print jobs forgotten at the printer. Most corporate print management practices make no provision for changing user habits to reduce this high level of waste.
Are your users printing only what they need? In the vast majority of print environments, color printing should be considered a luxury, not the default. But corporate print solutions make it too difficult to restrict users to specific modes or printers, especially in large environments, so a vast number of documents that would be perfectly adequate in grayscale are printed in expensive color. The same goes for other printing options like paper type.
Have you right-sized your print infrastructure? Every employee would love to have a dedicated personal printer on his or her desk. The routine answer to overwhelmed print servers is simply adding another print server. Yet all of this extra hardware bloats the infrastructure and drives up costs of procurement, operation and maintenance.
Are you auditing printing according to best practices? Best practices would call for you to have a solid fix on paper, printer and ink/toner usage at all levels — from organization-wide down to the individual user. To be fair, this is often easier said than done. Traditional print infrastructures such as print servers and conventional corporate print management methods don’t allow you to easily collect and analyze comprehensive data about your print environment. Therefore it can be challenging to implement.
PrinterLogic is unlike other corporate print solutions in that cost-effectiveness is in its DNA. It’s able to address every single point on the above checklist and start slashing your print spending from the moment of implementation. For example, its acclaimed centralized admin console brings a new level of ease to corporate print management. And its inherently small footprint allows you to eliminate print servers altogether and shrink your print infrastructure while providing for enhanced reliability and functionality.
Plus PrinterLogic’s Pull Printing module and Print Auditing features modules make it easy to introduce further efficiency into your corporate print management. Pull Printing cuts waste and increases security by making printing into a simple and deliberate two-step process: initiation of the print job followed by its execution (or release). Print Auditing gives you both oversight and insight by collecting and making sense of macro- and micro-level data on your print environment, allowing you to systematically target high usage.
So don’t be content with 3%. PrinterLogic can help you identify cost savings that standard corporate print solutions can’t.