Save on Printing Costs in 4 Steps

Are you planning to cut back on printing costs? If so, this will offer great benefits for both your management team and yourself:

• Saving money means: recovering lost revenue for the organization (reducing costs by about 20% to 30%).
• There are tools and service providers that can help you save on printing costs. This will save you a lot of time. And time equals money, so your management will be happy about that, too.
• You’ll also save time in the long run. Cutting printing costs means taking a close look at your processes and working more efficiently. This will save you a significant amount of time in the future when it comes to managing your printer fleet.
• And last but not least: earn points with your management team— points you desperately need to secure their willingness to invest in the additional IT projects you have in mind. You’re cutting costs on the printer fleet and supplies by managing processes more efficiently. In return, management will be more willing to free up budget for your other IT projects, such as that ERP system you’ve always wanted to replace.

With some help, he took a close look at his printer fleet and, within a year, achieved significant savings in both time and money:

• 50% reduction in printing costs
• From 80 printers to just 30 ColorQubes that need to be maintained
• From five to six types of printers to three
• From four people keeping an eye on the printers to one person keeping a close watch.
• From meters of shelf space filled with supplies to a single rack where everything they need for their printers is in stock

You’re not in this alone, and you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Whenever I’m faced with an issue from my management team, I always find useful online information and tools to be a big help. That’s why you’ll find a few helpful tips below to help you save on printing costs.

Start at the beginning; to know how to save on printing costs, you need to know how much you’re spending and on what. Furthermore, while management may tell you to cut printing costs, you might already be doing a great job and need to look for savings elsewhere. Of course, that could also be the result of your calculations, although there’s almost always room for savings (and generally speaking, the larger your printer fleet, the greater the potential for savings). You can use the tools below to get started calculating your printing costs.

Would you like to calculate the printing costs? If so, start at step 1 and work your way through to step 4.

1. Track the print volumes for each printer
   Find out how many prints are made per year per printer and distinguish between black-and-white and color prints. This will help you determine the ratio of black-and-white to color prints. For example, are more than 15% of the prints in color? If so, there’s likely an opportunity to save by setting the default printer settings to black-and-white. You’ll also see which printers are used frequently and which are hardly used at all.
2. What is the cost per print?
   If you know the print volume for each printer, you can calculate the cost per print for each printer. To do this, collect all invoices for consumables such as toner and maintenance kits for each machine separately. But don’t forget to include the following (indirect) costs when calculating printing costs:
   -Depreciation costs per purchased printer
   -Printing costs resulting from maintenance, management, and support
   -Contract costs for machines under contract
3. Place the printers strategically
   Now that you have an overview, you can decide which printer to place where. Don’t be afraid to make drastic changes—after all, they’ll pay off in the long run. To do this, enter the data from steps 1 and 2 into a table so you can get a clear picture of the current situation. See below for an example of such a table. 1. As a final step, examine how inventory management is organized in your organization. Do you have a storage room full of toner cartridges from decommissioned printers? If so, something isn’t quite right. Why is it important to manage your inventory wisely?
   - Stop wasting supplies and save money. Each printer requires about 4.4 different types of supplies. With about 20 printers, that adds up to 88 boxes. Since broken printers are often replaced with a different model or brand, you’re left with all sorts of old supplies that you can’t use. That’s a lot of money going straight into the trash.
   -Keep the printer running. Is the printer down because, for example, you’ve run out of toner cartridges? That means you can’t print quotes, invoices, or contracts, and work comes to a standstill. For some organizations, the ability to print documents is even part of their core process, as is the case with the Legal Help Desk.
   -Save time by delegating management to a colleague. Or automate inventory management with Managed Supplies Services so that you and your colleagues can spend your time on other tasks. By outsourcing inventory management, no one internally has to worry about restocking supplies on time; consumables such as toners and drums are automatically shipped as soon as a monitoring program detects that they need to be replaced.

Calculating print volumes and printing costs per print manually usually takes quite a bit of time. Want to save time on this? Then I recommend downloading software that automatically provides you with this information. What are the benefits of doing this?

• You'll save a lot of time.
• The printing costs per print are automatically displayed.
• A tool allows you to monitor printing patterns over a longer period (e.g., week, month, quarter), making your figures more reliable than those based on a single snapshot.
• Tools can sometimes also distinguish between departments and/or employees. This allows you to see whether the cost per print varies significantly by department or employee, so you can take appropriate action.
  Tip: Request print management software

Nuance Equitrack is print management software that helps you monitor printing costs per page. It allows you to track your organization's printing habits for a month.

Have you broken down your printing costs? If so, you can now compare them with those of other organizations using our tool!

The report answers the following questions, among others:

• Are you paying too much for a print?
• Does the organization print too much in color?
• Is there too much single-sided printing?
• Is the capacity of each machine being used effectively?
• Are there too many (or too few) printers compared to the number of employees?
• How much could you potentially save on printing costs?

Does your organization have environmental goals as well?

• How many trees come out of your organization's printers each year?
• How much CO2 is emitted during the production of this paper?
• And how much energy and water is used for this?

Now that you have all the information about your current printing costs and have identified opportunities to save money (as well as time spent maintaining your equipment), how do you put this into writing and ensure that your colleagues are just as enthusiastic about it as you are? Create a printing policy!

This document outlines the rules and standards that apply to (groups of) users of the printers and/or multifunction devices in your organization (in other words, your colleagues). Why is it important to establish these rules and build support for them?

• Support ensures that all your hard work pays off. After all, you won’t be able to cut printing costs if your colleagues aren’t willing to comply or don’t understand why they’re suddenly bound by rules regarding printing—and therefore don’t follow them.
• Establishing rules and KPIs ensures measurability. You should base the new rules regarding printer usage on specific objectives (KPIs). This allows you to measure progress after implementation and make adjustments as needed, ensuring that your management is—and remains—satisfied with your efforts.

1. Start by assessing your printing costs and printing habits. I’ve already given you a few helpful tips on that above.

2. Next, involve your colleagues in drafting the printing policy. What do they consider important? If you take the needs of your printer users into account, it will save you a lot of complaints and misunderstandings down the road. So start by conducting a survey to gain insight into employees’ preferences, needs, and satisfaction levels regarding the current printing and copying equipment. You can use an online questionnaire for this, for example. Here are a few sample questions:

• Name, title, location, department
• What printers do you use? (brand and model)
• What features are you currently missing that would make your work easier? (scanning to email, stapling, folding, punching)
• What types of paper do you use? (labels, blank A3, blank A4, CRM sheets, letterhead) You can use the results of this survey for a series of individual interviews with managers and heavy users, among others.

3. Next, you can identify the objectives and incorporate them into the printing policy in collaboration with your executive team (this ensures support from the top!). Make your objectives SMART:

• Specifically
• Measurable
• Acceptable
• Realistic
• Is the policy time-sensitive? If so, communicate it throughout your organization and emphasize its importance.

4. After implementing the printing policy, monitor progress and ensure continuity. As an IT manager, it is your responsibility to make sure that people adhere to the new rules. Otherwise, you will not achieve the objectives.