Print Deployment - Print Strategies

Jammed printers? Confusing copiers? Unwieldy user interfaces? Colour copying costs getting out of hand? No clear reporting lines on what department is responsible for which system? It’s time you looked at print deployment.

If your company is like most companies, you’ll probably be spending too much time and too much money on your printers. If it’s not dealing with the endless requests for toner and printer resources, it’s fixing minor technical problems like paper-jams, or calculating just how much the units are costing you in terms of paper and cost per page for the accounts department.

Most of your printer problems, however, can be solved by producing an effective print management strategy and being sensible about how you buy your consumables.

The first thing you should try is to consolidate printers where possible, and the best way to do this is by conducting a printer audit. Catalogue all the printers, talk to the users and establish what the printers were brought for originally, and find out why those particular models of printer were chosen. Ask the users what they utilise the printers for each day.

The easiest way to consolidate is to move to a workgroup printer rather than lots of personal printers. A single workgroup unit should comfortably be able to take over the workload of five or six printers each, and will automatically cut the number of possible support calls, as well as reduce your consumable costs. Plus, if you standardise on one type of workgroup printer throughout, then you’ll save money on consumables and spares.

As well as being capable of greater workloads, the latest workgroup printers also have functions that are intended to save time and money. Features such as duplex paper handling, which can help, reduce paper costs by 50 percent. Many new printers can also be configured and managed remotely. Chances are you probably have more printers than you actually need because of issues like security – for example, you don’t want the latest pay rises printed out on a central printer. However, with newer printers many have the facility to do PIN-based printing which increases confidentiality on individual job whilst encryption and decryption enable secure printing to network printers. Aside from hardware, there are other ways to reduce your print costs. There are software printer utilities that can lower the total cost of ownership, improve resource management and help productivity by monitoring and managing your company’s print needs. A typical utility enables you to centralise all the print management and lets you view, set up or remotely change the characteristics or defaults of both printers and jobs, from any point on the network. Users can start, stop, delete or move print jobs, or start, stop and move jobs in the queue or even shut down printers. Print time can also be saved by using intelligent document routing and scheduling, which matches each print job to the right printer, so jobs can be scheduled to destinations based on the size of the job, the resolution and any special features required such as duplexing or other document formats such as envelopes, A3 and so on.

When you’ve completed looking at what printers you have and what you’re printing on them, the last thing to check is how they’re maintained, supplied and costed. Typically, companies won’t have an idea how much a printer is costing them.

Supplies like paper and toner are ordered by the separate departments, or bought out of petty cash, and logsaren’t kept of how many pages are printed on each printer. So you could be spending hundreds of pounds on inefficient printers and on over-priced toner from the local supplier. Ideally you should be able to find a supplier who will supply toner and paper just in time, so you’re not constantly checking the toner levels or sitting on
costly unused stock.

In addition, a company maintaining and supporting the printers would also free you up to do he important tasks and reduce the endless “why isn’t the printer printing?” requests