How is your company reducing it's printing costs?

BrownSparrow

BrownSparrow

BrownSparrow

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Hi all,

I am currently investigating ways to reduce printing costs for the company i work for. I am looking at this from all levels, i.e. 3rd party toner, cheaper paper, print servers, pull/following me printing, turning printers off at weekends, ditching ink jets, utilizing MFP's, etc etc.

So i was wondering how other people and their employers were approaching this during these budget conscious times?

Thanks
 
if you look at leicester council they are trialling ipads...!

in all seriousness, we have shifted from everyone and their brother having their own network printer to their being just one or two large mfd's per floor. it's integrated with our building access system so we just swipe our id's and the jobs come out - this saves a phenominal amount of wasted paper and toner. these also provide every paper size going, both greyscale and colour, they staple, scan to email, blah blah blah. fantastic bits of kit, if only they could make me my morning cuppa!

i can't quote you any specifics on cost savings since i'm just an end user of the systems, but the project manager for the work has said they are significant.
 
1. Use multi function printers - not inkjets
2. et a contract for maintenance and toner, pay per page - aim for 0.04p for black, 3.5ish for colour.
3. Set all default to B&W to encourage users to cut back
4. Remove all standalone printers from desks. They aren't needed.
5. Get printer monitoring tool on server, provide dept. managers with printing costs for their dept. - put the onus on the dept. heads - not on IT
6. Possibly use pin numbers per dept (or individual) to trace whose printing the most

All of the above things have reduced our printer costs dramatically over a 12 month period
 
One that we've been asked to do:

Where available set printers to default to duplex printing, unless everyone is printing single page e-mails this should save paper pretty quickly.
 
atomiser said:
if you look at leicester council they are trialling ipads...!

in all seriousness, we have shifted from everyone and their brother having their own network printer to their being just one or two large mfd's per floor.
Click to expand...

This, but per area. I know they worked out significant cost savings on just electricity usage.
 
We are using PCounter to monitor print jobs. There are loads of things you can do with it, but even at the simplest level (using one of the tools included with PCounter to let users know how much a job is going to cost) I've heard of people dramatically reducing printer usage.

You may consider charging print costs back to departments/projects. You could also highlight the use of Save As PDF if you have Office 2007/2010, or if you don't, consider the use of CutePDF on all machines. It's a neat tool (and free).

In my opinion, to move as close as is possible to a paperless environment, you need to invest a fair bit of cash elsewhere - DM solutions etc. It's a change of culture rather than a simple imposed change from up top. Good luck!
 
PaperCut or uniflow, unsure which one we're going for yet but i think it's going to be one of those two, for our requirements both work out to the same cost

We'll be automatically redirecting any print jobs over X amount of pages to the MFPs in our reprographics department, all print jobs for teachers will be billed to their department, we pay per print on leased copiers and printers and the toners will be sent to us as and when they report that they are low (same with MFPs), each department with a leased printer pays for their lease
 
We're not TBH.

Main thing we could do to reduce costs would be to whinge at people who print normal stuff to the wax printers because it's nearer to them than one of the lasers :rolleyes:.
 
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Our offices are trying to go paperless with various bit of filing software namely Invu. It cost's a lot at first and I can't see it cutting costs and being worth it for another few years atleast!

Due to some of our office layouts there are a lot of printers almost a printer to each person in some which is not good practice. We are also getting all duplex printers and setting this as default.
 
PCounter here, seems to work good if you have a decent card swipe system (which we dont...)
 
We use PCounter to, pretty happy with it, but I'm convinced its printer port is responsible for slow data spooling on some of the 500mb PDFs that end up getting printed.
 
We have uniflow, but the standard windows print server is still active. Anyone who wants to bypass uniflow still can...
 
We use the big xerox things. So far they have:

1.) Made double side printing the default (annoying, I just change it back)
2.) Enabled secure print so the printer only prints when the user enters their pin into the printer. Annoying but very good as a lot of people print but then just forget it.
 
We try and urge our clients to avoid printing unnecessarily - especially things like emails. Why print them out at all if you can simply forward them to the person across the office.

Most of our clients use large multi-function machines all set to B&W. Only people who need to print in colour [graphics/marketing people] have access to a colour machine.

If you want to print to PDF, use PDFCreator. It is faster and better than both Office 2010 and CutePDF. I ran some tests a while ago and PDFCreator's PDF files were generally smaller with no loss in quality.
 
We just put uniflow so unless you have an authenticated domain account your print job gets deleted (..obviously there are ways around it). 1 MFP per department with follow me style printing. Working very well so far. The fact that print jobs are now monitored and charged back to departmental cost centres is also helping in print waste reduction too I believe.
 
This is how our company did it.... they decided to use recycled paper, then when the summer came with the hot weather, the printers jam every other page and so no one can be arsed to use them :P
 
Replaced all laser jet with two multifunction devices per floor, which you need to input your username into before you print. not really for security (altho added bonus) more so people dont send pages to the printer and then don't pick them up. print jobs are deleted from the queue after an hour or so (ie, if its not printed)
 
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