Mary LOVES to print full-color pages of her pet chihuahua. She uses her work-place printing machine, because it’s free, right? You have no print management solutions put into place, so how can managers address these sort of costly behaviors? You’re wasting hundreds of dollars per year, per employee. If that sounds alarming, it should be. Office employees print an average of about 10,000 pages per year, costing employers an average of $725 per employee per year.
That figure assumes an average cost-per-page of $.0725. Multiply that by the number of employees working in your company, and you probably have a figure reaching into the tens of thousands or more.
Print management solutions
Printing is still necessary for a wide range of processes, but employers can take charge of printing costs and incentivize paperless workflows. The truth is that most office tasks can be completed in a paperless manner. It’s up to supervisors and their managers to identify which ones and how best to implement that change. In most offices, average daily print volume skews towards a tight group of employees who regularly overuse printing resources. Some of these employees may have legitimate printing needs – many do not.
The key is to implement a system of accountability for print costs and to direct that accountability towards the individual who uses company print resources. Print management creates a system of incentive and discouragement that pushes employees in the right direction. An example of a print management system is Papercut.
What Papercut Does to Office Print Workflows
Papercut makes it easy for office process owners to reduce wasteful paper printing. The print management software makes it easier for employees to print documents when needed and to avoid printing when it is not. It incentivizes employees to make judgment calls on whether they really need to print out a document or not.
There are various ways that the print management software does this:
It Enforces Print Policy
More than 90% of American businesses have no formal print policy in place. Those that do have such a policy rarely enforce it at the individual level. Papercut does this by sending a series of pop-up alerts to individuals neglecting print policy rules. This way, accountability is made standard.
It Tracks Printer usage
Papercut tracks multi-function device usage at the employee level. Supervisors have accurate data about each department’s printer usage with detailed employee usage reports. Print logs make it easy to arrange this data and export it in HTML or CSV format. Now you can inform print policy decisions based on hard data.
It Prints Where You Need It To
Papercut’s Find-Me Printing feature lets employees retrieve prints from any company printer on the network. Using this signature feature, you can be in any room, in any department, in your office building, send a print command from a local workstation and have it arrive at the printer nearest to you.
It Generates Reports
Papercut generates comprehensive reports. The application gives you access to real-time one-click reports and ad-hoc reports with custom filtering algorithms.
It Offers an Enhanced Toolset
Papercut’s print environment is based on print credits. Every print costs a certain set number of credits. Papercut uses credits to track the usage figures of individual employees and give supervisors a broad range of user-specific tools for limiting or encouraging printer usage.
It is Mobile-Ready
With Papercut, you can print on any platform, using any device, in any file format. With this technology, a remote employee can print a document in your office from anywhere in the world. The print industry is now aligned with email and instant messaging in terms of its mobile compatibility.
Save Money with Papercut
Ongoing print costs involve more than buying printer cartridges. The vast majority of businesses do not know how much money they spend every month on printing consumables. Managed print services offer fixed prices per page, but Papercut breaks usage down into reports in formats you can use to dig deeper.
For example, Find-Me Printing functionality may lead you to discover that high-level employees lose valuable man-hours just retrieving printed documents from their local printers. This insight could lead to the deployment of smaller, dedicated desktop printers for the highest-volume users while appropriating the major workhorse printers to department-wide use.
Only Papercut creates print management system of incentives and disincentives targeting high-volume print employees.
Having individual employees pay for exceeding their allotted monthly print volume gives them a reason to stop and think about the value of each printed page – the same way you do. Papercut brings these money-saving features into your office, giving you a robust infrastructure for managing printing costs.
Contact us at 800.633.3673 today to set up a free consultation to see how Ford Office Technologies can help manage your print costs.
