Increase Office Productivity through Technology  January 2011
 
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 Why Control and Manage Company-wide Printing?

Is your company's printing cost out of control?

Did you know that in addition to toner cartridges and paper, on-going expense such as drum and maintenance kit makes the Total Cost of Ownership even more expensive?

Did you know that each maintenance kit and drum has a certain life span? And the life span is counted based on per printing page?

Do you want to monitor the cost of printing by individuals or departments and create an environmentally aware workplace?

There are several reasons and advantages for managing, controlling, and auditing company-wide printers, even for small to mid-size business and non-profit organizations trying to reduce office expense.

By carefully monitoring and analyzing users behaviors on every-day printing, you have a better understanding of  how your company printers are being used, by who, when, and what is being printed. This information can be used to assist you in decision making, whether to buy new printers or reallocating existing printers for more efficient usage.

You can implement print policy rules such as routing large print jobs to the most cost effective printer to reduce expense on printer supplies.

You have full control of setting quota to control or restrict employees from printing personal documents. For example, you can set different quotas to different user, group, or printer, or restrict certain individual user, printer, or department.

Irresponsible printing puts a strain on your company's office and IT expense.

Users will be more careful and waste less company resources when they know that they are being monitored.  Maybe they will use Print Preview before printing, Print to PDF, Print to Email, Print to a File, be willing to print on both sides of the same sheet, print only the selection they need, or even print multiple selections on a single sheet.

Print management software such as Software Shelf's Print Manager Plug or  CZ Solution's Print Job Tracker allow you to set limits by specifying what your employees can and can't print. If you are concerned that a particular printer is being used for personal purposes, you can simply monitor the print jobs to find out, then do something about it.

Print Management software saves you time and money in many ways you may have never considered before. Setting quota and monitoring employee printing behaviors can definitely save you money on printer supplies because less paper and toners will be used. It helps your company reduce not just office expense, but also IT resource as well with the following features:

Centralized Management and Monitoring: Acquire information related to printing, including name of the user or computer who sent the print job; Destination of printer name; Printed document name, File size, Paper size, File Type; Print request time and date; Page set up; Color;  Print job size; Number of printed pages, Duplex, and even number of paper consumed. This useful information can be used for decision making when the time arise to add new printers.

Send alerts with printer status: Printing errors, low in printer toner, printer out of paper, print error, print job have remained in the queue for longer than the pre-defined allowable wait time. Act and stock up before the toners are running out can reduces office down time.

Set print quotas and restriction  You can set limits by specifying what your employees can and can't print. If you are concerned that printers are being used for personal purposes, you can simply monitor the print jobs to find out.

Pause or cancel printing when the print job exceeded the maximum allowable. Quota can be reset by day, weeks, or month. Restrictions can be set based on user, computer, printer, printer groups, document title, color, job size, day/time of the print jobs.

You can set multiple restrictions on a user, user group; deny certain users form printing to color printer; deny printing based on certain time of day, deny printing is printing is not set to duplex; check the remaining balance; sent balance pop up message to a user the the remaining balance is low. Employee will be more sensible and waste less company resources.

A perfect Tool for troubleshooting too: Since you now have the ability to track each page that is printed from every computer on your network,  it means your IT staff now have the ability to troubleshoot printing related problems in a more timely matter, because the problem will be pinpointed back to a specific computer or printer.

Print management software also provide a perfect report for auditing or reallocation purpose. You can simply use the one of the many pre-made report and graphs to make it easy to monitor printer usages. Perfect for budgeting.

The term "Paperless office" has been around for as long as you can remember. Yet, we don't seem to be able to get rip of paper totally.

Printing can be expensive. Reducing the amount of printing to a minimum not only reduce your office expense, but also reduces the environmental impact. The impact includes trees, energy, and greenhouse gases. Every one can help.

Laser printers are getting cheaper and cheaper, but the Total Cost of Ownership has not came down like the cost of laser printers. How so? Most printer vendors sell their printers as a loss, and expect to make money on printer supplies, mainly toner cartridges and maintenance kits.

You can easily cut down expensive printer supplies cost by choosing a more cost effective printer, a large printer instead of going with several small personal printers.

High capacity toners produce more than triple the output of small toners which made for small personal printer, and so one high capacity toners always cost less than three small toners. Time saving on replacing toners also reduce total cost of ownership in the long run.

However, toner cartridges and maintenance kits are still remain the highest expense for all laser printer, and so cut down unnecessary printing maybe your top priority. You can do more than just setting quota or restriction for each users or department to reduce toner and paper consumption. Yes, there are many ways to reduce your office expense, and you can change employee printing behavior by using printing management software to manage and monitoring printing behaviors in your company.

More than just setting quota and restriction, you can use print management software to reduce printing cost, monitoring usages, auditing printer infrastructure, budgeting forecast, even for printing problem troubleshooting.

Printer auditing lets you know exactly the number of printers in your environment, how they are being used, and how much it cost you. It provide an effective way to save money without affecting employee productivity.

 
Visit our web site for more solutions - www.contek-office-tech.com