5 Ways to Decrease Print Consumables Cost

Posted by Andrew Miller

Most organizations know that print consumables account for a significant and ongoing part of their enterprise printing budget. Research has shown that, on average, it can cost anywhere from $0.05 to $0.08 per sheet for black-and-white laser prints or $0.12 to $0.15 per sheet for color laser prints—with inkjet prints typically priced considerably higher. What’s often overlooked is that the costs of those print consumables leave a lot of room for improvement. Fortunately, there are some easy ways to reduce printing costs and lessen their impact on your bottom line.

Here are five ways to reduce print consumables costs that any organization can implement:

1. Duplexing. Enabling double-sided printing for your devices by default can come close to halving your paper consumption. With the right print management solution (see #5), setting automatic duplexing for all printers can be as simple as marking a checkbox in the management console. That makes this method one of the simplest and fastest ways to reduce printing costs right away.

2. Rotate printers. As printing devices age, they can become less efficient and reliable. Maybe you have an old workhorse printer in your own office that occasionally prints streaked, unusable pages or goes through toner at a faster rate than its more current counterparts. Regularly rotating printers out of high-use settings and into low-use settings can reduce print consumables costs and even get more life out of your fleet. One caveat, though, is that you need insight into your print environment to know how to rotate printers effectively.

3. Limit color usage. Let’s face it, even the most environmentally conscious and budget-oriented employees still like to print their documents in color when grayscale will suffice. Color is obviously more visually appealing, but it’s also at least twice as expensive. By restricting the availability of color printing—once again, you’ll need the right print management software to make this an easy task—you can reduce printing costs dramatically.

4. Make printing more intentional. By harnessing new paradigms like pull printing, your organization can cut down on wasted print jobs and all the consumables they fritter away. Pull printing divides print jobs into two steps: initiation (clicking “Print”) and execution (authorizing the printer to carry out the actual printing, commonly through a badge reader or LCD panel input). This prevents print jobs from being forgotten or abandoned in the output tray. And it doesn’t just reduce print consumables costs. An important side benefit is that it also makes printing more secure.

5. Implement PrinterLogic. This is actually the single most effective step toward reducing printing costs because it makes the preceding methods even easier to achieve. PrinterLogic’s acclaimed centralized management console allows you to set resource-saving default options for any printer in the organization from a single pane of glass. Its Pull Printing module and Print Auditing capability integrate seamlessly into any environment, providing benefits like effortless oversight, user-friendly security and data-driven insight into your entire print environment. Together these can help reduce print consumables costs by changing wasteful printing habits.

Furthermore, PrinterLogic’s next-generation enterprise print management solution can do far more than reduce the costs of consumables. Because it has the ability to eliminate print servers completely while delivering increased functionality and stability, our solution can reduce printing costs associated with infrastructure, including procurement and maintenance. That’s why close to 70% of organizations surveyed by the independent research company TechValidate reported a 15% reduction in consumables usage through PrinterLogic (TVID: 7F5-FCC-413), and 88% in a separate survey reported 100% ROI or greater after installing PrinterLogic (TVID: 054-57D-184).