How to Build a Better Print Infrastructure (and Save Money) Through Print Job Audits and Reporting

At a time when we seem to have data on everything, enterprise print environments can still be something of a mystery. 

Organizations might track page counts, which is common practice when using managed print services. Or they might keep track of the total cost of consumables like paper and toner. But comprehensive, actionable data on print activity can be hard to come by.

Gaining more visibility into the print environment is also sometimes a distant priority. Given the limited auditing tools offered by most printing solutions—not to mention the complexity of server-based print infrastructures—a lot of IT admins just end up focusing on print management. Who has time for printer consolidation initiatives when just deploying printers is so much hassle?

Print auditing and reporting with PrinterLogic changes all that. It makes it easier to gather (and share) useful micro- and macro-level information on your entire print environment. And by easing the burden of routine print management, PrinterLogic allows you to prioritize and act on the info that print auditing provides.

PrinterLogic’s advanced reporting capabilities extend across your print environment—even to USB-connected printers. That means you can collect detailed info on print activity right down to the device and user level. Anywhere in the organization.

Using PrinterLogic’s web-based admin console, for example, you can easily view stats on color printing, document types, duplexing and application usage. These stats are shown as both text and graphs. You can even dive deeper and look at when individual jobs were printed along with the filenames of the print jobs.

Here’s a small sample of the custom reporting options with PrinterLogic.

• Summary of print activity by location

• Print activity during a given time period

• Job and page counts

• Black and white versus color

• Printing usage by paper size

Auditing doesn’t do much good if the data doesn’t end up in front of decision makers. Which is why PrinterLogic makes it easy to share it. You can either export print activity data as a CSV or you can have it automatically emailed to department heads or the CFO.

This short video shows PrinterLogic’s print auditing in action.

Now that the how of PrinterLogic’s advanced reporting is clear, it’s time to talk about the why. As in, what’s the point of accessing all this data?

The simple answer is that it allows your organization to make more informed—and cost-saving—choices.

If you see that one user is printing out a lot of files titled “Party_Invite.pdf” and “Garage_Sale_Poster.png” on the color printer, you can take steps to minimize their personal printing. Or if there’s a printer that only receives a few jobs each week, you can use it to balance the load at a location with heavier printing needs.

Even if your company uses managed print services, you can leverage PrinterLogic’s data to verify the counts provided by your MSP.

As for infrastructure optimization, PrinterLogic’s powerful print auditing and SNMP monitoring allow you to adjust your printer fleet to address current printing trends. Is there one printer that’s generating a large number of error alerts? And what happens if two or three employees are responsible for most of their department’s print usage? With PrinterLogic, you can see which printers to retire or how to rearrange them for lowered costs and increased productivity.

This is where PrinterLogic’s effortless print management comes into play. Unlike cumbersome legacy printing solutions, our centralized administration enables admins to create and enforce cost-effective printer policies. It only takes a few clicks to configure and apply a printer profile that defaults users to black and white after every single print job.

It’s also easier to deploy and redistribute printers, thanks to our serverless printing infrastructure. And PrinterLogic’s serverless printing doesn’t just eliminate the need for print servers. It gets rid of the need for GPOs and scripts too.

See what I mean about superior print management freeing up time to implement new printing policies and establish better printing practices? That’s exactly why Hamilton County, Indiana looked at its available printing solutions and chose PrinterLogic. Our print auditing is now helping them gain valuable insight into their distributed print environment. (Read the case study here.)

Advanced reporting is a built-in feature of our on-prem printing solution, PrinterLogic Web Stack, as well as our cloud-based printing solution, PrinterLogic SaaS. To figure out which one is right for your organization, sign up to start your PrinterLogic trial today. It’s free to test for 30 days.