Webinar Recap: Printonomics

Remember your last math class? 

You thought none of it would apply to your future career, and then, low and behold, you’re managing hundreds of printers and sweating bullets trying to track print costs.

This is particularly true for IT teams with complex, distributed print environments where quantifying cost, efficiency, and consumable waste seems like advanced calculus. 

Luckily, we hosted a webinar called Printonomics to help IT pros like you identify the actual costs of printing and turn what was once a complex math equation into simple subtraction. 

Watch the recording below or read on for a quick event summary. 

Everything has a price. But when it comes to printing, it’s not just about the cost of consumables like paper and ink; it’s the hardware, loss of productivity, and security vulnerabilities that exponentially drive up costs. 

And, if you want to really point the finger, your print servers are the main culprit for higher print costs. We highlighted a few reasons why:

• Single point of failure: Printing stops when print servers stop.

• Deployment overhead: Failed scripts and GPOs lead to more helpdesk tickets, meaning more money out of your company’s pocket. 

• Maintenance and patches: IT pros dedicate a lot of time to maintenance and security patches—especially when spooler vulnerabilities are exploited.

• Security vulnerabilities: The average cost of a data breach in 2023 is $4.45 million—a number that has risen by 15.3% since 2020.  

Even with a perfect track record: Zero vulnerabilities, no failures, and no failed deployments, Quorcirca still estimates that companies spend around $3400 yearly per print server. 

Truth be told, the odds of having a perfect year of printing are the same as winning the lottery.   

Time is money in the eyes of an organization. And when IT teams constantly spend time on print-related issues, your company could argue they’d rather invest money in your team tackling mission-critical objectives—not printing. 

But which areas of printing does IT spend the most time on?

According to one study, IT teams spend an average of seven hours on print-related tickets per 100 calls. On top of stacks of helpdesk tickets, IT teams find themselves stuck spending time reacting to low consumables, pulling print reports from various OS and manufacturers, and updating printer drivers.

Fortunately, there are a few ways to reduce time spent on print management. Our experts identified a few modern solutions that help you erase tedious troubleshooting tasks from your agenda, including:

• Self-service printing

• Real-time printer alerts

• Automated reports

• Customized and automated deployments

• A dedicated printer driver repository

We’ll talk more about how you can implement these later, but these solutions also help you address sustainability initiatives, which we cover in the next section.

Sustainability has become a must for companies building for future success. Gartner found that 80% of business leaders see sustainability as a strategic play to optimize and reduce costs. 

Sustainable printing, however, has been a proverbial thorn in the side of IT. Ninety percent of North American companies are unaware of how many printers they have. Without a clear view of how many printers you have, it’s fair to assume those companies don’t know how much they are wasting. Formstack notes around 30% of print jobs never leave the print tray, and 45% of documents are trashed by the end of the day. 

So, what steps can companies take to start printing more responsibly? Here are a few tips:

• Centralize your print environment to learn what you have in your ecosystem.

• Track print jobs based on user, group, and department to determine your consumption.

• Set quotas based on cost or volume to discourage unnecessary, large print jobs.

• Add an authentication step for each print job with pull printing functionality.

These tips fall under the same umbrella of creating intentional printing habits. Once you have these practices and features established, that’s when the savings start to trickle in. You’ll see paper and ink consumption drop, users will become more aware of what they are printing, and confidential documents won’t sit in the print tray.

How do you add value to your team through subtraction? 

The solution is simple: Eliminate your print servers.

PrinterLogic helps you cut costs and reclaim the time you’ve lost by moving your printer objects from print servers to our centralized, cloud-native platform. Admins can deploy printers without GPOs, track print jobs, and empower end users to install printers themselves from a single UI. Moreover, our solution leverages direct IP printing to keep jobs on the local network, eliminating spooler vulnerabilities for good. 

Want to put a number on your potential cost savings after eliminating your print servers?

We’ve developed a formula to help you calculate your print savings by answering eight simple questions about your current print environment.

Try our free print savings calculator now.

Tanner has been traveling the world since 2012 and gained a lot of experience in B2C marketing overseas and domestically. He got his start in South Korea as a linguist and educator for six years before transitioning to the science and tech field where he has written blogs and created fun content for start-up franchises. After finishing up his M.A. at Southern Utah University, he has placed focus on delivering easy-to-read content with a splash of personality to his readers.