If you are tasked with managing a large fleet of printers and copiers, here are some tips that will make your life much easier and also save you quite a bit of money.
- Default everything to B/W (monochrome). If you have color printers or color copiers, a great way to reduce your printing costs is by defaulting everything to B/W. This simple change can reduce your costs on one color machine by as much as 75%. Force your users to override the default setting and choose color only when needed. You can also allow only certain users to be able to print in color.
- Analyze your current printer and copier fleet and replace older and inefficient printers and copiers. Some of your older machines could costs as much as 5 times the cost to print a page versus a newer, more economical machines. In addition, many older machines will have print quality issues and are prone to jams and breakdowns due to their age. This greatly impacts your IT Support and comes with a considerable cost. Printer that are out of service typically cause workflow issues, lost productivity, changes in procedures, and user frustration. Replace any machine that is End of Life, has poor print quality, needs to be serviced frequently, or inefficient to operate.
- Change from using print servers to direct IP printing. Most corporations are now going to direct IP printing versus using print servers. Direct IP Printing is where the printers are setup individually on each PC instead of going through a print server. Print Servers are a single point of failure and also use resources and have costs associated with running them. A great tool to move to a direct IP Printing environment is PrinterLogic. PrinterLogic allows you to deploy Direct IP printers and print drivers to all your desktop PCs throughout your organization very easily and eliminate all your print servers. It has a self serve portal where end users can add printers to the PCs by clicking on a printer from a list or a map of the office showing where all the printers are located. PrinterLogic offers mobile printing, secure printing, and pull printing options with the ability to release print jobs with a PIN Number or Employee ID Badge, When you add this plus the excellent reporting capabilities of PrinterLogic, you are getting a tool that will greatly reduce the amount of work associated with deploying printers and print drivers in your environment.
- Consolidate models. By consolidating your printers, you standardize on one brand and a handful of models. This provides redundancy for your print and copy devices and also a huge reduction of the different toner cartridges that you have to keep on hand.
- Stop buying toner cartridges. If you are still buying your own toner cartridges, then you are spending a whole lot more than you should be. Get on a Managed Print Services (MPS) program right away. A MPS program can supply you with all the OEM toner you need plus include onsite service, parts, labor, maintenance kits, and helpdesk support for typically less than what you are paying for just toner cartridges. A good MPS program can save you 20% to 40% on your printing and copying costs. Most MPS programs can monitor your toner levels and automatically ship you a new toner cartridge when they see you are getting low. You will never have to worry about ordering toner again.
- Quit leasing your printers and copiers. Leasing equipment is costly and locks you into a long term agreements with the banks. Not your copier company. There is very little flexibility when you lease your equipment. Renting your printers and copiers is the way to go. There are many reasons why renting is better than leasing but the biggest one is the flexibility. When you rent, you are able to add and remove equipment as needed with a simple email to your account manager. Without having to sign another agreement or extend your existing agreement.
- Quit maintaining and supporting your printers and copiers yourself. Did you know that as much as 40% of your IT Support calls are printer related? Use a MPS vendor and have all of these call go over to them. This will greatly reduce your IT Staff's workload allowing them to work on more important tasks.
I hope these tips help you and point you in the right direction in managing your printer and copier fleet. At TotalPrint USA, we strive to really help our customers save money on their printing and copying costs and also reduce the amount of resources that you need to dedicate to supporting your printer and copier infrastructure. Contact us today to see how we can simplify your life and handles all of this for you.