There are many ways to reduce your printing costs. Some quick fixes to lower costs include adjusting your settings to only allow documents to be printed in black and white or duplex (double-sided). You could also educate users to only print in colour when it is absolutely necessary. Unfortunately, many of these methods are difficult to maintain and they do not allow for complete control over your printing environment. If you want a more sustainable and controlled print environment, the answer lies with Print Management Software.
What is Print Management Software?
Simply put, Print Management Software allows for monitoring of all printing devices within an organization. When a user selects to print, the software intercepts the print job to analyse the data. At this stage print policies (like forcing the document to print in black and white) are applied and the job is only released to the printer once the user logs into a device to select and print their job.
When Would You Consider Implementing Print Management Software?
If you are asking any of the following questions, then you definitely need to consider monitoring what your users are printing:
- How do I prevent users from abusing colour printing?
- How do I recover print costs if more than one department is using the same device?
- What are users printing?
- How do I reduce paper wastage from documents left uncollected at printers?
- How do I report on print volumes / usage?
The problem with default settings is that users can override them and control is then lost. This software allows for rules based printing that enforces general printing rules, which might be applicable to specific users / groups or on print settings like colour or single-sided printing.
Find-Me is another benefit of Print Management Software. Find-Me allows the user to go to the nearest device and release their print job from there. This solution reduces wastage from documents left uncollected at the printer. If a printer is out of order, users can release their print jobs from the next available printer without disrupting business operations.
This ensures that printing is confidential to the user which makes your company POPI (Protection of Personal Information Act) compliant when it comes to printing.
Printing is an essential part of business and unless it is closely monitored could become a very expensive overhead. Print Management Software is key to providing visibility in user printing behaviour that allows you to implement preventative measures in keeping costs to a minimum.
In order to choose Print Management Software best suited to your environment and manage user printing software, please download and complete the Software Requirement Guide to assist you through the process.
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