If your employees don’t practice “smart printing,” your multifunction devices are sucking the life (and financials) out of your company.
We talk a lot about the importance of using managed print software and bringing in print management experts like the DocuMentors™ to spearhead your company’s printing efficiency. But it’s not just about bringing innovative technology, expertise and resources in — it’s also about the seemingly small, everyday decisions your employees make about document production.
It’s about prudent printing: making smart printing decisions throughout the day, every day.
To get your company moving forward as a cohesive, cost-effective force in efficient document production, you must educate your employees on the following best printing practices:
- Get your employees to kick the printing habit.
Start with one question: Do I have to print?
It sounds simple enough. It sounds like common sense. But you’d be surprised how often this question is completely bypassed every time someone heads for the Print button.
The average employee consumes over $1,000 in printing resources each year. To put it into paper perspective, that’s about 8,840 pages per year, or 34 pages per day. To make matters worse, it’s estimated that 17% of those 8,840 pages (about 1,500 pages) are never even used. Many are never even picked up from the printer.
So why print?
Get your employees asking themselves questions like, “Do I truly need this information in a physical document, or am I just propelled to print because it makes me feel safe?” And, “How essential is this document to my presentation or report?” And, “Is color printing necessary for this project?”*
In other words: “Do I have to print?
- If you have to print, print smart.
- Set your multifunction devices to double-sided (duplex) printing to significantly reduce paper waste. Allow for exemptions to double-sided print only when necessary and make sure your employees understand the impact that “it’s just a few more pages” has over time. It’s truly a snowball effect.
- Use your multifunction devices’ built-in features. Many devices have a print draft feature, which is incredibly helpful in reducing print waste. This tool allows employees to send multiple copies of a job to a printer, but only print one draft. This way, they only finish the job by pressing “Continue” if the draft looks good. If the draft comes out with mistakes on it, they simply cancel the job and avoid waste.
Print preview is another feature you should use to double-check the document before printing and ensure you’re only printing what you absolutely need.
- *VERY IMPORTANT: Keep color printing in check! Sure, colors have their purpose when it comes to drawing attention to certain parts of a report or engendering aesthetic appeal in a presentation, but most of those 8,840 pages that each employee prints a year are not part of important reports and presentations.
Contracts, reference documents and notes — if they need to be printed at all — must be printed in monochrome. Just a few splashes of color, like blue hyperlinked text, boosts printing costs.
If you’re serious about cutting your color printing expenses, make sure all internal company templates are created in black ink only. Instruct employees that all document production, barring special circumstances, should be monochrome-friendly. Allow only one or two multifunction devices access to color printing. Additionally, mandate that no employee set a color device as his or her default printer.
- Install free tools to help you out.
Instead of printing a document and then scanning it into a PDF, or printing and then faxing documents, install a free “print to PDF” tool on each computer. Converting files to PDF and then sharing via email is a cheap, effective and eco-friendly alternative to printing.
By implementing these prudent printing practices into your company’s culture, along with outsourcing managed printer services, your company becomes a high-functioning, cost-cutting non-printing machine.
Schedule your free consultation with a DocuSense DocuMentor today to get an idea of what a fully customized, end-to-end print management solution would look like for your company.
