October 9, 2013
As we have discussed in these past blog articles, Understand the Components that Determine Your Printing Costs and Unmanaged Office Supply Expenses, printing costs can be a significant investment for businesses, more so if left unmanaged. However, even when managed, printing costs can add up.
Printing has become extremely fast and simple. This ease-of-use, combined with the convenience of having tangible printed documents ensures printers will continue to be utilized in the workplace. Even Generation Y, though raised on rapidly improving technology and mobile devices, still require and utilize printers (hence the evolution of mobile printing).
Printers will also continue to be used inefficiently. We can all remember a time or two, when we crossed our fingers after we push PRINT, hoping the document would turn out as intended. However, we spent little time to ensure accurate output, because after all, it is only a few pages and a little toner – if it doesn’t turn out right we’ll just try again.
Or, and this happens extremely often within workplace environments, we push PRINT and never claim our documents or file them away never to be seen again.
The convenience and ease-of-use printers provide us is extraordinary, but it also prevents us from stopping for a minute and asking ourselves, do I really need a hard copy of this document? Many businesses have added eco-friendly messages in the signature of all sent emails, encouraging readers to take a minute to ask whether or not it is necessary to print.
There are print practices you can put into place during printer setup, along the same lines as the eco-friendly email reminder, which will help your office save money and become more environmentally friendly.
Defaults
During printer setup you can configure standard defaults, which automatically set the print preferences for any user trying to print to the printer. Print defaults are important because users generally don’t adjust their print settings before hitting PRINT, unless their document has a specific purpose or print output required. Here are a few common defaults that save many businesses money:
Black & White
Black and white printing is significantly cheaper than color printing. The average cost per page differs by about 10 cents. Comparing the cost savings of 1,000 pages of black and white versus color, you can begin to see the trend.
- 1,000 Black & White Pages at .03 per page = $30
- 1,000 Color Pages at .13 per page = $130
- Total Savings = $100 for every 1000 pages printed
Duplex Copies
Duplex, or 2-sided, printing can cut your paper consumption in half. For a single print job this may not appear to save you drastic amounts of money, but long term the savings add up. Standard reams of white printer paper cost around $6; how many reams you go through each year will vary based on the size and type of your business. But let’s say you go through two reams of paper a week prior to setting duplex printing as a default, which is a fairly small amount, you could save at least $300 dollars a year by simply making this switch.
Additional Print Options
The following print options will also enhance efficiency if they are right for specific documents or workplace environments.
Combination
Combination printing enables a user to print multiple pages of the document on one piece of paper. This print option can be very useful when printing PowerPoint presentations, image heavy documents or personal documents not being shared or displayed, for example. These are some of the standard combination options:
- 2 in 1
- 4 in 1
- 6 in 1
- 9 in 1
- 16 in 1
- 2 by 2
- 3 by 3
- 4 by 4
Security Printing
Finally, security printing can prevent documents from getting lost in the shuffle – especially in situations where printers are being shared by multiple employees (which should be the case if your office is set up efficiently; the standard printer to employee ratio should be near 10:1).
This option can also prevent unnecessary printing. Remember in the example above when documents get printed but never get retrieved from the printer? Security printing will minimize this issue because documents aren’t printed until a user enters their access code on the printer, to produce the document.
Request a free print technology assessment to determine if these print preferences and options could save your business money.
