Posted by Andrew Miller
The key to successfully administering a cost-effective enterprise print environment is truly understanding that print environment. Knowing its strengths and weaknesses, its layout, its levels of usage, the ins and outs of its infrastructure. To obtain that macro- and micro-level information, a print audit is the most natural method.
That can be harder than it sounds. Hiring an outside consultant to come in and conduct a thorough and worthwhile print audit of your environment can be incredibly expensive, especially for a report that is only likely to generate a one-time snapshot. The findings from this kind of audit could be outdated through a simple departmental reconfiguration, and any consultant will invariably have to be brought back in to conduct a follow-up audit to see if their recommendations from the initial print audit were successful.
The alternative to consultants is print auditing software. A good solution allows you to keep ongoing tabs on your entire print environment and will have relationships with major office equipment manufacturers. But there are several drawbacks to a print auditing software, chief among them the fact that it is an add-on solution to print servers, not an integrated one. Generally, its information collection engine runs in the background and conducts periodic scans of the environment which doesn’t gather the data in real time. Plus all of your organization’s print data is transmitted off site to the provider’s servers.
Wouldn’t it make a lot more sense to have print auditing software that was already a secure and integral part of your existing print management solution? What better way to gather and assimilate data on your print environment than by using the solution that drives it?
PrinterLogic’s print audit capabilities are integrated into the core of our enterprise print management solution. There’s no need for discrete print auditing software because native, comprehensive print audit features are available from the moment you implement our next-generation solution. You can instantly begin gathering a wide variety of essential and eye-opening data from your print environment, including:
Your individual users ranked by their level of print activity
Which departments are printing the most—with weekly, monthly and quarterly breakdowns
Not just the number of pages printed but the actual costs of printing, organized according to a variety of criteria
Levels of actual printer usage as well as consolidation and phase-out guidance
When, where and by whom documents were printed
Print jobs arranged by grayscale/color, duplexing, document name, execution date and many other data points
Our print auditing software can even capture data associated with USB printers. And unlike the workflow with other print auditing software, your organization’s print audit data stays entirely in-house. At the same time, the information is easy to share with decision makers and department heads when necessary. You can even have print audit reports automatically e-mailed to them at regular intervals to ensure that they’re aware of the progress your organization is making toward efficiency targets.
The simplicity and effectiveness of these print audit capabilities is borne out by our customers’ experience. In one survey, the independent research firm TechValidate found that 69% of verified PrinterLogic customers were able to reduce their usage of print consumables by 15% or more just by implementing our solution (TVID: 7F5-FCC-413). Another TechValidate survey revealed that 85% of the respondent organizations had seen ROI of more than 100% after installing PrinterLogic (TVID: 9A7-F9E-D49), thanks in part to our superior print auditing software.
Of course, PrinterLogic’s built-in print audit functionality are only one aspect of what makes our enterprise print management solution so effective and highly praised. Centralized administration and the ability to eliminate print servers are some of the other unique features that put PrinterLogic head and shoulders above the rest.