Photo Credit: Andy14darock
How many times have you gone by a printer only to notice that there are documents printed but never retrieved by the person that printed them?
From my experience, around 20% of office printing is needless and wasteful. I have implemented many cost recovery solutions and my clients typically see a permanent reduction in printing of approximately 20%.
Many companies do not centrally manage printers and allow departments to order their own printers and buy their own supplies. Because these costs are often not managed or tracked, there can be no real way to know how much of a budgetary impact they have.
Because there are often many models and types of printers, it is not uncommon for a printer to be retired or discarded. Supplies are still on the shelf that have been bought and paid for that can no longer be used.
Could documents left on printers have sensitive data about your business or even worse, HIPAA-related data? Each violation of HIPAA could carry a fine of up to $50,000! Click to see HIPAA Policy.
The best strategy is to study the current print fleet and make sure that the right printers are being used. Once the fleet is right-sized and streamlined, management tools can watch the usage and provide extremely accurate reporting down to the individual or document. These tools can also give control over who can print color, what applications can be printed from and even allow the ability to see departmental cost.
What about the wasted prints and the sensitive data? By implementing a “find-me” or roaming print strategy, both of these areas can be addressed. An individual can “print” a document to a virtual printer and then retrieve that at any printer in the fleet on demand. If they never retrieve the document, it is simply removed after a given time. No waste. No security concerns.
If reducing costs in your workplace is important to you, click here to get access to our Cost Recovery Calculator.