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10 Print Management Tips to Save You Money

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IT has had its ups and downs over the past couple of years, as economic conditions have required companies to not only cut costs but sometimes to cut spending altogether. While spending on most IT projects fell significantly, the printing business has not skipped a beat. Historical data indicates, as shown in the image below, that printed pages have grown every year since network-connected printers went mainstream in the early 1990’s.

So, with printed pages on a relatively constant upward trend, I get asked all the time about how best to save money in this space. Below are some of my most common suggestions.

10 Ways to Save Money through Active Print Management

1)      Stop printing altogether. Though it may sound crazy, the number-one way to spend less on printing is to stop printing, or at least reduce your printing of non-essential documents. Reducing print volumes is hard because we have trained ourselves to print as a part of our daily routine. However, by performing a thorough review of your business processes, identifying where and when printing occurs and recommending alternatives, you can realize major cost savings across the company if even small adjustments are made by every employee.

2)      Tighten supply chain management of toner and other consumables. There are technologies in the market today that allow you to order toner and other consumables in a just-in-time fashion, delivering toner and other consumables directly to the person responsible for installing it in the printer. This strategy can eliminate toner closets thus freeing up cash that would otherwise be tied up in pre-ordered consumable items. 

3)      Outsource non-strategic printing. Non-strategic printing refers to large jobs that typically require special treatment such as color, gloss, weighted paper and/or binding. This can include large format plotters, training materials, infrequent large jobs and finished marketing materials to name a few examples. Although outsourcing sounds expensive, depending upon your printer use it is very possible that this strategy may actually cost less than leasing, maintaining and using the printer hardware required to meet these occasional needs.

4)      Track your costs. Create a document that tracks and reports your ongoing printing costs. For small operations, this can be as simple as putting together a spreadsheet and updating the source data every month based on output and supplies used. For larger organizations, however, manual cost management is much more challenging. That being said, just like in personal finance, if you aren’t tracking your costs you cannot affect them.

5)      Get an outside opinion. For a number of reasons, most organizations do not have their arms around their printing costs, and often the day-to-day decisions about print strategy are not made at a high enough level within organizations. Getting an outside opinion about your printer environment from an expert such as your manufacturer or VAR may help you find some areas for savings that can be implemented quickly and with little risk.

6)      Replace color printers with monochrome printers. As a rule of thumb, color pages cost eight-to-ten times the amount of monochrome pages and most documents do not need to be printed in color. Based on your print volumes, you may find an immediate and significant ROI by moving away from color on most machines. For those documents that require color, keep several, low-TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) color printers in strategic locations throughout your office environment.

7)      Consider compatible or non-OEM toner. Though OEM toner is guaranteed to give you the highest quality output, most non-OEM toners offer near-OEM performance at significantly lower prices. Keep in mind that a non-OEM or compatible toner strategy requires testing and a commitment to work through occasional toner defect issues. Also, it is common to use compatible monochrome toner while still using OEM color toner for priority print jobs. 

8)      Investigate alternative printer manufacturers. It’s possible that your organization has been purchasing the same brand of printer for many years, for reasons such as standardization, driver compatibility, availability of supplies and familiarity with the technology. Today’s printers, however, incorporate very similar technologies across manufacturers and many have universal print drivers. Reevaluating your standards and using TCO as your baseline for making a decision may lead you to a different brand of printers that will work more efficiently for your needs.

9)      Remove locally attached printers from the environment. Locally attached printers — those that serve only one user — are typically the highest TCO printers in an organization. With only a few exceptions, it is a best practice to push printing to network- connected, shared printers. This strategy can reduce your dependence on high-cost supply items, help managers better evaluate the printer use of subordinates and help you eliminate SKUs from your supply chain management.  Since every printer users a different toner cartridge, eliminating SKUs will ease supply chain management issues experienced by purchasing departments.  Less SKUs means less work.

10)   Invest in print management software. One solution that can assist you in many of the strategies above is to install print management software. Like your other infrastructure-monitoring applications, print management software surveys your organization’s overall print environment and provides you with the data and reports that you need to make changes that directly affect output and costs. Without print management software, having a complete view of your print environment can be a time-consuming and difficult task. For large organizations with 100 or more printers this is an ideal solution. At MCPc, we’ve seen savings up to 8 - 12% from customers that implement print management software along with active monitoring and strategy.

Following one or more of these will help reduce costs and cut spending at the same time.  Which strategy works best for you?  Please feel free to share your best practices by posting a comment.  I look forward to opening up this discussion with you.

Jeffrey Goldstein is Senior Consultant at MCPc and is responsible for the delivery of hardcopy and value-added services within the Lifecycle Management Group. Connect with Jeff on LinkedIn.