It’s 2013 but we’re still printing things out.
Often it’s unavoidable, but a recent IDC report showed that more than 50% of smartphone and tablet users expect to use mobile print in the office in just two years’ time. When you think of all the documents needing signing, meeting briefings and hastily scrawled notes because it’s easier than annotating something in Word, all that adds up to a lot of trees.
However, enterprise mobility solutions firm Cortado says it’s here to help. One or two bright sparks there have come up with ten ways to cut the cost of printing to reduce the burden on your business.
1. Analyse costs – Implement appropriate tracking tools or solutions with integrated tracking to provide an overview of device utilisation and analyse costs.
2. Implement cost: saving printer settings as default – Default settings or draft-quality printouts significantly reduce both paper and toner costs.
3. Introduce pull printing – Pull printing, user-authenticated initiation of print jobs, at the printer not only increases security but also lowers the cost of printing by up to 20%.
4. Reduce administration costs for printer driver management – Centralising printer drivers on a central print server and the use of virtual printer drivers reduce effort and costs to a minimum.
5. Reduce helpdesk calls with common print dialogues – Common print dialogues, offering users a clear interface for all printers, reduce helpdesk calls and require no additional training for users.
6. Print data compression – Print data places a strain on both CPUs and networks. What should be looked at here is a solution that significantly compresses print data.
7. Reduce hardware costs – Hardware costs can be reduced by introducing a solution that is not bound to specific hardware manufacturers and models.
8. Lower support costs and implement print servers – A print management system with printer status indicators allows IT to act proactively, replacing toner before users can no longer print, and thus avoiding a loss in productivity, while introducing a print server allows for simplified management and maintenance of systems.
9. Use digital printouts – In many cases documents are only needed as digital printouts on a tablet or smartphone for reading, tickets, flight check-ins and so on. Introducing the potential to digitally print documents reduces waste and cost, and has a positive impact on the environment.
10. Move printing to the cloud – Full migration of printing services to the cloud is growing in popularity to reduce costs in the complex area of printing.
