How to Reduce Printing Costs with Rules-Based Printing
Posted on Wed, Oct 12, 2011 @ 12:03 PM
Studies have found that the average employee prints 10,000 pages per year, making 17 percent documents "waste." This unnecessarily drives up printing costs for employers. However, by implementing rules-based printing as part of a total print management solution, there’s an opportunity to manage and reduce these costs.
Rules-based printing applications enable IT to take a corporate policy and apply it to all printers in just a few clicks, and include solutions such as HP’s Intelligent Print Management and Canon’s uniFLOW. Using this software, IT administrators can easily set printing policies such as:
- Always print duplex versus single-sided
- Designate when color printing is allowed based on document type, application source, personnel and department
- Automatically reroute certain print jobs to a specific machine—e.g. sending all large, color jobs to a central copier
With rules like the ones above, organizations can reduce print spend by controlling who prints, what and how. Read on for more details on rules-based printing, its business benefits, and purchasing and implementation tips.
Evolve a Legacy Management Process
Historically, applying corporate printing policies universally across all machines was a time-intensive and complicated process. This is because IT administrators had to change printer properties on every print server manually, one at a time. For large businesses with thousands of print queues, this could take months to complete, even with a dedicated resource assigned to it.
Then, if the operating system installed on a PC or laptop wasn’t the same version as that on the print server, there was a risk that changes wouldn’t get pushed down to the users’ workstations. To be absolutely certain updates were made, machines had to be reviewed individually—an impossible undertaking for large organizations.
Rules-based printing reduces these complexities and replaces the manual process by adding a layer between the print server and the printer. The software intercepts every print job, applies corporate policies and rules, and then forwards data on to the appropriate printer.
Cut Printing Costs with Rules-Based Printing
Rules-based printing also has a very positive ROI. While prices range from $225-$450 per printer in the first year for the software, support and implementation, savings in supplies and IT efficiency are typically much larger. In fact, according to Gartner Research, “actively managing office printing can lead to a reduction of 10%-30% in recurring spending in document output.” There are also soft costs from a reduction in manual management, oversight and maintenance. Our customers typically see ROI within 9-24 months. How quickly they see these savings depends on a number of factors, including number of printers, total print volume and software costs.
In addition, it’s easy to track ROI because the application collects its own data and statistics. This lets you pilot a rules-based printing program inexpensively, and use the test data to make the case to move forward in other departments or buildings.
Procurement and Implementation Tips
Rules-based printing is most effective in larger companies where it is too difficult or expensive staff for manual rules management, and, typically, the larger the company the better the savings. If this sounds like your organization, following are some tips to get started.
Applications tend to be developed by printer manufacturers or their software partners—very few are vendor-neutral. Therefore, it’s important to pick the application that goes with your hardware. For example, if you’re an HP house, you’ll want to look at Intelligent Print Management.
Note: Rules-based printing solutions can get expensive for companies that don’t have manufacturer standards internally. To accommodate a mix of brands, models and print drivers, you’ll need to buy add-ons, which deduct from cost savings.
In addition, you’ll want to base policy decisions on historical data and measure their effectiveness over time. Rules-based printing software collects a wealth of information for you including:
- Job size
- Number of single-sided versus duplex print jobs
- Number of print versus color copies
- Who is printing and how often
- Applications for which jobs are printed (e.g. Word, Excel)
Take the time to gather benchmark data prior to implementing print polices, so you can evaluate results later.
Your Thoughts?
What print management issues are you facing? Have you tried a rules-based printing solution? Why or why not? Share your thoughts below.
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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.
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image credit: garryknight