How innovative printing strategies could save you money

In this increasingly digital world, you have a world of tools at your fingertips to make better printing decisions, helping you financially, reducing waste and streamlining your processes.

Despite living in a digital world, offices are still surprisingly paper heavy, with every office worker uses 10,000 sheets of A4 paper per year according to the Federal Government's Green Office Guide.

Even with this substantial use, printing is often an overlooked opportunity to save significant costs with more efficient printing systems.

With digital tools providing valuable data, businesses can gain insight into how much they are spending in the print environment and start to manage their printing costs.

Canon’s recommended strategies for reducing print costs include:

1. Delve into the detail – print insights

It’s important to get a good overview of how much paper your organisation is using and why. With so much data at our fingertips, businesses can receive in-depth data insights in real-time. With monthly, quarterly and annual reports, you can gain valuable understanding to identify where you can reduce waste. When you can see your costs, you can better manage them. For example, you can easily identify a certain person or department is printing unusually high amounts and investigate to understand why. Better insight reporting also helps you better track your costs against specific projects or customers and make sure you regain these expenses if appropriate.

2. Rules and routing

For larger organisations, there could be multiple printers across different departments. Without a structured system, devices are likely to be inefficient; for example, someone could inadvertently print out a 100-page report in full colour when black and white would do.

Installing intelligent print systems allow you to set rules for automatically sending jobs to the most cost effective printer – that 100-page report will now print in duplex and black and white. All the staff member has to do is hit ‘print’ and collect.

You can also use rules and routing to help protect your sensitive business information, restricting who can print confidential documents and which printers these can be sent to.

3. ‘Follow me’ printing

One of the most effective functions for reducing print wastage, is ‘follow me’ print. A user sends a document to print, but the job only releases once the user has walked over to the device and logged in. If a user accidentally prints the job more than once, they see this and delete the unnecessary jobs. Not only does ‘follow me’ print eliminate waste from uncollected jobs, it also protects sensitive documents from being lost or falling into the wrong hands.

4. Optimise your print fleet

Before finding a print solution for your business, it’s a good idea to conduct an assessment of your existing print environment. It will help you to ascertain how many devices you have and examine their efficiency. As part of the evaluation, you will get a report for each of the audited sites, including usage information and related costs. With advances in technology, it’s highly likely that you are currently running more devices than you need. An assessment will give you the information you need to develop your future strategy and can help you drastically save money in the longer term.

5. Opt for a Managed Service

By choosing a managed document service (MDS), you gain all the benefits of a more efficient print environment, with the added ease of having someone manage this for you. According to IDC Research 2016, with MDS most companies see a print cost reduction of around 30 per cent on average in the first year.

MDS combines the above strategies into one package, giving you the following advantages:

Productivity – For many businesses, printing is crucial to their day-to-day activities. MDS helps customers match smarter workflows with business processes for higher productivity

A greener footprint – Businesses want to show that they’re environmentally friendly and leaders want to highlight their corporate social responsibility. MDS can help you achieve these goals by providing reporting insights into sustainability

Security – Your printer is a smart device and connected to your network. It stores your business information and can if not managed properly, could open your business to unnecessary risk. Yet despite 84% of businesses being aware of the security threats around printing, only 4 in 10 businesses have secured their printers, according to the Canon Business Readiness Index on Information Security. MDS will give you the peace of mind of a secure print environment, along with the latest security options to help you keep you valuable business information safe.