Many studies, including one done by Gartner, discovered that, on average, a company spends about 1-3 % of its total operating costs on printing! And that measurement doesn’t even take into account associated costs such as printer service and maintenance, IT support for print-related tickets, energy consumption and more.
The cost of printing can add up within any organization. How confident are you that your business has a firm grip on its printing costs?
If your answer to that question is any number less than 100 percent, that should lead you to two follow-up questions: what is causing the overall cost of printing to be so high, and how can we minimize it?
The key to finding those answers lies in examining your printing devices and your team doing the printing. People often focus solely on managing their fleet of printers and copiers when they think of their print environment, but should it be just as essential to manage the people who are printing?
You may have heard the term “printers don’t print; people do.” Is this really the case, or is it just something bosses tell their employees as an attempt to save pennies on printing costs? Let’s take a look.
What is Device Management?
Device management focuses on controlling both what printing equipment you currently have deployed (from desktop printers to full-size multifunction copiers) and the hard costs associated with a fleet of copiers or printers. This often includes lease (or purchase) payments, service charges, toner and paper.
Device management essentially boils down to ensuring you have the right equipment and the right supplies on hand to keep things running smoothly and efficiently. Downtime is expensive, so you must have the right equipment and supplies on hand to keep things running smoothly.
What is User Management?
User management is about managing who, how and when your devices are being used in the office. Have you ever questioned if particular people or positions are printing more than others? If some of your team members print more than others, is all that printing required, or is it a learned habit?
By examining who is doing the most printing at your organization, you can uncover opportunities to streamline business processes, leading to reduced printing costs and potentially improving productivity, access to vital information and team morale at the same time!
Or, you may find that everyone is printing their memos in single-sided colour and implementing a simple print-rule that prompts users to use double-sided and black and white print settings will drastically reduce your printing costs. Either way, a little work taking the time to dig into how your users are printing can significantly impact your bottom line.
The Best Place to Start? A Print Assessment
Before you can determine the best solution to reduce your printing costs, you first need to understand your current printing situation. Conducting a print assessment will help you learn the what, who, when, and how of your print environment.
A print assessment offers many beneficial outcomes. From a device management perspective, a print assessment will determine how much you’re truly spending on printing—collecting device data from your printer(s) on the type, age, locations, and service history of each device. It will also assess how much you are spending on consumables (paper, toner and ink).
The key benefit to this type of analysis is that you will know which devices are overworked, which will eventually break down and require replacement, as well as which printers are being underused so that they can either be redeployed or eliminated.
To improve user management, a print assessment will collect user data regarding who, when and how much each employee (and department) is printing every day, week and month. They can even track what programs they are printing from. With that information, you can decide if implementing print controlling policies makes sense to your workplace.
By educating users on efficient device use or possibly implementing embedded printing rules, many businesses have significantly cut costs and improved productivity. For example, a little-known printing fact is that the third most printed colour document in the typical office is a webpage from recipes.com. Think about what that means for your CPC fees and toner usage if there are hundreds of pages of colour impressions being printed every year on something that would be so easy to prevent!
Want to Book a Print Assessment for Your Business?
If, after reading all this, you recognize that better managing both the users and devices in your print environment could make a significant difference to your bottom line, we are here to help!
Contact us today for your very own, 100 percent free, print assessment!
Cory Porteous
Director of Marketing & Inbound Business Development
Office Interiors
