While I don’t want to get down on employees (after all, I’m an employee myself), it’s no secret that their printing habits can be kind of, well, careless. The average worker prints about 34 pages a day, yet 17% of those pages go unused. Close to two-thirds of the documents they do print are thrown away or recycled on the same day.
That can have a big impact on the cost of your corporate printing. If print-related expenses add up to 3% of your company’s annual revenue, imagine how much your organization could save if your print solution helped you reduce the number of unused or recycled pages.
Then imagine how much you’d save if that same print solution could also eliminate print servers. But we’ll get to that.
What causes careless employee printing?
Though it’s easy to blame employees for wasteful printing habits, sometimes the reason is that they just aren’t clued into the particulars of corporate printing. Paper and toner are always supplied to them; they never see the price tag on consumables. They also overlook the fact that those costs add up to a pretty hefty chunk of change when individual waste is multiplied by every user in the organization.
Basically, careless employee printing comes down to three things:
Ignorance. Employees simply lack knowledge or awareness of actual printing costs.
Resources. There just isn’t enough time or money to educate employees and give them the tools to print successfully on their own.
Oversight. The organization’s current print solution offers limited visibility into the print environment, and monitoring print activity would add one more layer of complexity to print management.
And the effects of all this aren’t limited to your organization’s bottom line. It can also pose a threat to your print security.
Reducing the costs of corporate printing
One immediate action you can take is to raise awareness about print waste. Once you know its sources, then you can start to curb it.
With most print management software, identifying and quantifying waste across the company can be hard to do. PrinterLogic makes it super easy. Our print solution has an advanced reporting feature that can track print jobs and calculate their real-world costs. Those reports can even be sent to department heads automatically for routine print auditing.
Another proven way to cut costs is to reduce your overall print infrastructure—starting with eliminating print servers. You can do that by upgrading to a serverless printing infrastructure like PrinterLogic. It delivers reliable, feature-rich printing alongside centralized management from a single pane of glass. At the same time, PrinterLogic shrinks your print infrastructure footprint to almost zero.
Harden print security and trim print waste simultaneously
Curbing waste doesn’t just have to result from cost-cutting initiatives. Functions like pull printing and secure release printing have a twofold benefit of increasing the security of your print environment while keeping unwanted print jobs under control.
How exactly do they do that? Well, take PrinterLogic’s secure release printing as an example. With this feature, users have to authenticate before their print job is actually executed. That prevents printed documents—especially sensitive ones—from being forgotten or abandoned in the output tray. Which reduces costs as well as corporate risk.
And because it eliminates print servers from corporate printing, PrinterLogic also reduces the attack surface of your organization.
Print management tips to limit careless printing
When trying to steer employees away from bad printing habits, an important thing to remember is that you’ll achieve more by working with them, not against them. Here are some useful tips along those lines:
Automatically revert to black-and-white after each print job. After implementing PrinterLogic as its print solution, the law firm Fennemore Craig, P.C. used this method to cut color printing by 85%.
Use pull or secure release printing. The Fulton County School System found that this actually had a triple benefit. Pull printing didn’t just curtail abandoned print jobs and add security. Employees also found it to be more convenient.
Find a print solution that empowers end users. PrinterLogic offers a self-service printer installation portal that lets employees safely identify and install printers on their own. Centria discovered that the portal reduced misdirected printouts as well as helpdesk calls.
Monitor print activity through oversight and regular auditing. PrinterLogic’s centralized print management and advanced reporting makes this easy for any IT department.