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A Smarter Approach to Printing

Graham Lowes 9th Jan 2010

Graham Lowes, marketing director, OKI Printing Solutions

Reducing paper consumption is one of the most effective measures businesses can take in order to ?go green? and help reduce materials wastage. A recent report by leading economics consultancy, the centre for economics and business research (cebr) has found that firms and other organisations could save between ?900 million and ?2,100 million per year on printing costs.

The report estimates that ?360 million of these savings could come from replacing expensive outsourced printing with printing in?house while between ?500 million and ?1,760 million could be generated by more efficient management of existing in?house printing tasks.

In this context, businesses can achieve benefits by more closely managing paper usage. Of course, every business has an intrinsic need to produce printed output. For most organisations, the paperless office is a bit like ?utopia? - an ideal that is difficult to achieve. In our lifetime it is unlikely to become a reality because workers and working practices are used to having paper-based documents and will continue to want and need hard copies of reports and other essential business documents.

So how can organisations eliminate unnecessary paper usage and by so doing reduce wastage and achieve associated environmental benefits? One of the most effective ways is by adopting a managed print strategy.

Typically, this involves the print vendor and its reseller partner identifying the true existing print costs of the business, implementing the printing solutions to meet those costs, managing the entire fleet and tracking activity to keep the print operation optimised for maximum productivity at the least expense.

As part of a typical managed print contract, the end user business will receive detailed budgetary report based on the actual print volumes associated with each device. This enables the organisation concerned to reduce wear and tear on individual printers and also allows it to identify areas of wastage or excessive usage.
Educating Users

Businesses can achieve additional savings by adopting smarter printing practices. Much of this involves a process of educating users to reduce paper wastage.

Users can save on resources by following the ?think before your print? guideline and never printing emails simply to read them, for example. If they really need to print, they can do so in mono rather than colour. In addition, they can be trained to cut paper wastage even more by always using print preview and by using a web print utility to ensure each web page fits on one side of paper.

From Outsourced to In-house

Businesses can further reduce wastage and costs simply by reducing the number of expensive outsourced printing jobs they undertake and by using their office printers more effectively. In doing this, they need to change their mindset and understand that a large percentage of printing, previously the domain of expensive outsourced print shops, can now be done quickly and cost-effectively by staff using their own printer. Thanks to advances in print technology, organisations can now print a much broader range of documents in-house, including letterheads, notices, reports and labels.

Over 20 per cent of all outsourced printed material is never used. Hundreds of business cards and reams of headed paper are discarded every year. Today, it is increasingly important from both a cost saving and environmental perspective to improve the ?utilisation ratio? when printing. Producing documents and brochures on-demand as and when required is a sure-fire way of cutting costs and improving productivity.

Configure Printers Correctly

It is also important to ensure that printers are correctly set up to minimise time and paper wastage. Using ?mono? when documents don?t need to be in colour, using ?duplex? for double sided printing and creating A5 booklets with multiple images on each sheet could save an average business unit or department thousands of pounds every year in ink, toners, paper and time, while at the same time, enabling them to deliver a better service.

In a business environment where budgets remain tight and resources scarce, these kinds of techniques for efficient printing can bring ever-more attractive benefits ? not least in reducing paper wastage and mitigating the impact of printing on the environment. For more information about OKI and smarter print management, visit www.okiprintsmart.com/uk.