Best Practices to Control Print and Copy in Large Organizations
Almost any medium and large organization with substantial computer and printing reliance will often pay millions for the luxury of color printing and copying. With the urgent need to save on resources as well as reducing the cost of IT, printing is now an important part of an organization’s expense tracking.
Introduction
What can you do to curb exploding printing costs and reduce your corporate carbon footprint while still being able to capitalize on state-of-the-art printing equipment?
There are some obvious answers:
1) Make sure you only purchase printers with a low stand-by power requirement, as this immediately calls for the requirement of fast warm-up times. On your existing hardware, make sure the printers that have power save mode have it switched on. If it is a model that takes a few minutes to warm up, you may want to consider purchasing a newer model as the time lost for your employees may be more expensive over a year than a new printer.
2) You may ask your employees to only print documents in color that really need printing in color as color toner can be at 10x the cost of the same page printed in black and white, i.e., proof printing, emails, memos and contracts should all be monochrome, while presentations going into the hands of a customer should be color.
3) The same applies for copying and color copying. Certain users do not require color copying and need to be advised to not copy personal information often done after hours when the managers have left the building. Others should only print or copy in duplex mode (using both sides of the paper) as this can reduce the paper requirement to half for those applications. In larger plotting applications forcing paper to a maximum size will reduce ink and paper use.
4) Large print jobs should only be sent to an appropriate printer, i.e., more than 100-page prints sent to the mail-room production printer where a banner page is included automatically and an e-mail notification sent once the job is ready to be picked up.
However, the larger the organization the more difficult it becomes to make people understand and follow these rules, so here a printed output management system that can enforce your policies comes in handy.
Benefits of an Output Management System
Once an output management system is in place, significant benefits can be yielded. There are two primary categories, Non-Interactive and Authenticated Access:
Non-Interactive:
Accounting for color or monochrome pages by client, user, department or device
User based, departmental or client based charge-back
Rerouting of too large print jobs to the mail room
Quotas can be enforced
Billing back to customers, departments or users
Authenticated Access:
Convenience printing – user authenticates at a printer of choice
Uncollected prints are deleted from the print queue
Rerouting notification at any printer
Personal job list at the printer device
Print, copy, scan, fax and e-mail access control
Conclusion
If you own your printer fleet you should make the most of it by providing users with the best capabilities but also enforce policies that prevent waste of paper, toner and energy.
The largest sources of waste are uncollected print jobs or mishandled print jobs. An output management system that prevents the print from coming out until you identify yourself at the printer is a simple-to- implement and cost-effective way to stop that waste.
Usually an output management system can save energy by allowing your print to follow you to the printer of your convenience, store the job until you are ready to collect it or delete the job without any waste if you have not collected it within a preset time.
A side effect is that your job is secure; nobody can look at it as it is not sitting in the printer’s output tray for hours and mixed in with other people’s print jobs.
A good output management system will also allow you to produce statistics proving how much you have saved by giving you the information of how many jobs / pages have been automatically deleted.
Author: Klaus Bollmann
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Canada duty rate
« Printing Photographs on Canvas | Home | Early Indigo Dyeing & Printing Methods »
Leave a Comment