If you run a business, you know that printing can be a significant expense. Studies show that printing costs can account for up to 3% of a company's revenue.
But with the right printer strategy, you can reduce costs, increase productivity, and improve your company's environmental sustainability.
Here are some tips for creating a printer strategy for your company:
1. Assess Your Printing Environment
Before creating a printer strategy, you need to understand your printing environment. This includes the number and type of printers and copiers you have, their use, and how much they cost. You can gather this information through print audit services or print management software.
2. Set Goals and Objectives
Once you understand your printing environment, you can set goals and objectives for your printer strategy. These might include reducing costs, improving productivity, increasing security, or promoting environmental sustainability.
3. Develop Print Policies
Print policies are guidelines that govern how employees can use printers and copiers. These policies can include rules around duplex printing, color printing, and print quotas. Developing and enforcing print policies can reduce waste and save money.
4. Implement Follow Me Printing and Secure Printing Solutions
Follow-me printing, also known as pull printing, allows employees to send print jobs to a virtual queue and then release them at any printer or copier that is equipped with follow-me printing capabilities.
This can help to reduce the number of unclaimed print jobs and reduce the risk of sensitive information being left in the printer tray. Secure printing solutions require employees to authenticate themselves before releasing their print jobs.
This helps prevent unauthorized access to sensitive information and ensures that confidential documents are only printed by authorized personnel.
5. Use Print Management Software
Print management software can help you monitor and manage print activity across your company's network.
This can provide insights into how printers are being used, identify improvement areas, and help enforce print policies. Fleet management software can also manage a company's entire printer fleet, including printers, copiers, and multifunction devices.
6. Implement a security policy
To ensure printer security, companies should restrict access to printers and copiers, implement secure release printing as previously mentioned, keep printer firmware up to date, and physically secure printers.
Printer security measures should be an integral part of any printer strategy and companies should develop processes for implementing and managing printer security features.
A good advice is to have a default configuration backup of your printers, so its easy to re-image them in case of any attack. This will be a quick action depending on the print management tool used, and anything thats not included in the default configuration backup would be deleted and the firmware would be upgraded to the latest.
Review and Revise Your Printer Strategy
Your printer strategy should be viewed as a living document regularly revisited and revised to ensure that it effectively meets your company's needs and objectives. Review your printer strategy annually and revisit it whenever your business needs change significantly or new technologies that could benefit your company are introduced.
By following these tips, you can create a printer strategy that helps to reduce costs, increase productivity, and improve your company's environmental sustainability.
A printer strategy is crucial for any business that wants to optimize its printing environment and save money.