Digital transformation is a clear goal for many executives and their teams. With a few notable exceptions, printing is an option in today’s business world – not a requirement.
This situation produces an incentive for executives to ask questions they’ve never asked before. Because printing is no longer the de facto method of communicating through documents, print processes now have to offer value.
While the dream of the paperless office remains in the minds of many, the fact remains that print is big. There are some processes for which print remains the most cost-effective and efficient method of communication.
For example, when producing client-facing documents that may result in renewed business, or offering investors and stakeholders a company overview, the ability to print in bright, vivid color is appealing. These are documents that don’t translate well to a tiny smartphone screen, and certainly shouldn’t be printed in newspaper-style monochrome.
But these are just a few of the millions of documents office managers across the United States print every day. Finding easy ways to reduce printing costs per page is an important contributor to the overall value of print-related processes.
What You Can Do to Reduce Printing Costs Per Page
Assessing your print environment can lead to important insights about how to reduce printing costs per page in your office.
Creating a comprehensive print policy that includes the following items can significantly boost the overall profitability of your print-related processes:
1. Print Duplex
Duplex printing is the fastest way to cut paper consumption costs in half. Unless there is a legitimate reason, supported by rational arguments, to print one-sided documents - duplex printing should be set to default.
With the right policy and print infrastructure in place, you can establish duplex printing for specific document types. This avoids over-reliance on having employees remember increasingly complex print rules and regulations. For example, you can simply set your office printers to print all PDF files as one-sided documents, and all Word Documents as dual-sided ones.
2. Print Monochrome by Default
Color is another important area of consideration for the efficiency-minded office manager.
Generally speaking, most internal documents do not need color printing. Your print policy should outline exactly what types of documents require color and why – employees will find it easier to follow the rules if they know why they are there in the first place.
As with duplex printing, the right print fleet management software can automate the decision between printing in color or in black and white. With complex routing in place, monochrome documents can automatically print at the most cost-efficient printer available, overriding employees who may wish to print at your most expensive per-page printer just because it happens to be physically closer to their desks.
3. Use a Dual Monitor Setup
Another useful way to reduce printing costs per page is reducing your overall reliance on internal print processes.
Many knowledge workers print documents in order to copy data from the printed document to a digital one. If workers have access to a second display, they may be able to forego the printing process and simply pull up the data they need from your document management archive.
For most employees, the process of constantly clicking back and forth through multiple windows is a time-consuming, productivity-stifling nuisance. They prefer to print out the document so they can copy whatever information they need from it with a mere glance.
A dual monitor setup can achieve this and save money over time.
4. Implement Pull Print
Pull print is a solution for reducing the number of unclaimed print jobs stacking up in output trays throughout your office. Unclaimed documents can be a serious security vulnerability, especially when dealing with industries that deal heavily in sensitive customer data, like health care clinics and legal firms.
Pull print holds outgoing documents in the print queue and quickly prints them only when the user who requested them is present. Documents remain encrypted on the printer’s hard drive until the moment of print, ensuring that no stray documents end up in the wrong hands.
5. Purchase Print Tracking Software
You can’t manage what you can’t measure. This is one of the bottom-line truths of management in any domain, but it’s especially true of print management.
Print tracking software allows you to find out exactly who is printing what, and how often. It gives office managers the ability to hold employees and departments accountable for their print decisions.
Start Reducing Your Print Costs Today
ImageNet can help you implement strategies for reducing the cost of printing throughout your entire organization. Our print tracking software offers the data you need to find out exactly how you could be saving on your print processes.
Learn how you can implement these simple steps to reduce printing costs per page by talking to one of our specialists today!