With enterprise printing, as with every other operational budget item, there are visible costs and then there are true costs. The visible costs of enterprise print management are fairly easy to calculate. There are the printers, naturally, and then there are consumables like toner and paper. A surprising number of organizations stop there. They assume that these enterprise printing costs are the only significant ones, and that they’re pretty much fixed and irreducible.
But actual enterprise printing costs have the potential to go far beyond that. Take print servers, for example. Countless organizations continue to use print servers as their default enterprise printer management solution, and these devices are far from being cost- or hassle-free. There are costs of procurement, operation, maintenance, licensing and upgrade associated with print servers. Those dollars add up over time, not least when you factor in the expensive man-hours involved in enterprise print management when using print servers—troubleshooting, complex printer installation and deployment, driver management, lost productivity during downtime, support desk calls, and so on. Now we’re getting to the true costs of enterprise printing.
Even the costs of printers and consumables aren’t as fixed as you might think. A study by a leading print manufacturer found that 17% of all print output was considered waste. This includes web printouts with a single URL at the bottom of a blank page, duplicate copies, reprinted jobs and abandoned printouts. That means almost one out of every five printed pages is squandering paper and toner as well as causing unnecessary wear and tear on the printer itself. When you consider that enterprise printing costs account for somewhere between 1 and 3% of an organization’s revenue, the wider expenses associated with enterprise printer management start to become apparent. There’s a lot of opportunity for cost savings in that wasted output.
Here’s the problem, though. Just being aware of the scope of enterprise print management expenditures isn’t always enough to do anything about curbing them. You need to obtain hard data on the details of your enterprise printing costs, and you need to have the ability to follow through. PrinterLogic enables you to do both.
Our next-generation enterprise print management solution gives you immediate access to built-in reporting functionality, so you can determine data points like the most heavily used printers and the users with the highest print output anywhere in the organization. This is a comprehensive, useful and effective way to identify high consumable usage and encourage individual users or departments to cut down on excess. PrinterLogic’s Print Auditing capabilities takes this a step further, putting advanced data points like aggregate print job information and cost–benefit analysis into your hands. With this information, you can consolidate printers to reduce infrastructure and determine real-world enterprise printing costs by department, location or printer.
PrinterLogic doesn’t just provide valuable information about your print environment. It also makes it possible to implement the initiatives that address enterprise printing costs at their source. With Pull Printing, for instance, you can tackle everyday waste by adding an intentional but convenient “release” step to your printing protocol. Not only does this make printing far more secure, it also avoids duplicate jobs, reprints and abandoned printouts. Thanks to features like these along with PrinterLogic’s inherent efficiency, almost 70% of the organizations surveyed by the independent research company TechValidate reported a 15% reduction in consumables usage through PrinterLogic (TVID: 7F5-FCC-413).
You no longer need to guess or estimate how much enterprise printer management is costing your organization. With PrinterLogic, you’ll have that information—plus avenues for action—right at your fingertips. And in addition to allowing you to eliminate print servers and all their attendant costs, too, PrinterLogic keeps adding to its ROI through the stability, ease of use and seamless integration that results in fewer service desk calls. It’s the simplest way to discover, analyze and reduce the true costs of enterprise printing.