While your office printer may be an indispensable business tool, do you really know how much it costs your business? According to Gartner, 90 per cent of companies don’t know how many printers they have or how much they spend on print. Yet, print is widely accepted to be in the top three business operating expenses behind rent and payroll.
Cutting your office printing costs can, therefore, make a sizeable impact on your bottom line.
The good news is that there are plenty of ways to cut printing costs without compromising on quality, accessibility, or performance.
Here’s five ways to do it:
1. Implement rules
Most modern printing solutions let you impose rules on users that can dramatically reduce the cost of printing. Defaulting to black and white, double-sided printouts can save both toner and paper. Furthermore, restricting the number of pages each user can print may encourage them to think more carefully about the documents they print out, reducing the amount of printing they do.
2. Implement pull printing
People often print out documents they don’t really need, then leave them sitting on the printer. Worse, they print out sensitive or confidential documents, then forget to pick them up. This wastes paper and creates a security risk that could lead to an information breach. By requiring users to enter a PIN or swipe a card at the printer before their documents print out, wasted paper can be dramatically reduced and security gaps addressed. That’s because jobs are only printed when the user releases them and is standing at the printer, ready to pick them up. So, documents aren’t left sitting on a printer for anyone to see, and people don’t print out jobs they forget to pick up.
3. Review your fleet
Many businesses have more printers than they need, with each manager having a printer on their desk. This can be inefficient and costly. Large print jobs are often sent to slower, more expensive printers while other devices remain under-utilised, making it hard to achieve a return on investment. By reviewing your printer fleet, you can consolidate and streamline the number of devices you have, ensuring you’re not paying for machines that are seldom used.
By combining a more streamlined fleet with pull printing capabilities, you can reduce the need for additional printers on desks. Even people such as HR managers or legal and finance professionals who regularly print confidential information can use a common printer without compromising privacy or confidentiality.
4. Customise settings
Intelligent, rules-based settings can make smart decisions to further reduce costs. For example, printers can identify large or resource-intensive print jobs and route them to the most efficient or fastest device. This avoids tying up printers that people use for normal document printing, letting the office carry on with business as usual while larger jobs run.
5. Monitor printing
Don’t be one of the 90 per cent of companies that doesn’t know how much it spends on printing. You can’t measure what you can’t see; by implementing a managed print services program that includes comprehensive monitoring, you can see where your business spends the most on printing and, therefore, where you could make big savings. Complete cost transparency includes a breakdown of print usage by individual, department, or printer.
Implementing a charge back system can help you recoup the cost of printing from clients. But, if you don’t know how much you print and can’t associate print jobs with clients or projects, then charge back becomes imprecise. Along with a comprehensive print monitoring contract, you should consider implementing a charge back solution that integrates seamlessly with your printer fleet.
These are just a few of the ways you can cut the costs of printing in your business. Talk to Konica Minolta today about how you can slash costs and improve efficiency in your business.
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