Reduce and Eliminate Wasted Print Jobs

Posted by Andrew Miller

A 2006 study by a leading printer manufacturer found that 17% of all printed output in the enterprise was considered waste.

Before we continue, take a moment for that figure to sink in. Think of all the wasted paper that 17% accounts for in your own organization. All the wasted ink and toner. All the wear and tear on the printers themselves. Environmental consequences notwithstanding, think of how that 17% directly affects your bottom line. It shouldn’t take long to see that there are considerable cost savings bound up in those wasted print jobs. And those savings are just waiting to be unlocked through the right print job management software with the right print job tracking features.

In traditional print environments, properly managing print jobs and maintaining both macro- and micro-level oversight has been one of the most challenging tasks for IT admins. Direct IP printing is renowned for being reliable and stable, but its print job tracking leaves a lot to be desired, and even the most advanced print job management software is unable to deliver a clear window onto the entire print environment. By contrast, print servers make managing print jobs and print job tracking a little easier, but they come with their own brand of headache and create more infrastructure to wrestle with.

For organizations, printing thus becomes a choice between the unmanageability of direct IP and the hassle of print servers—neither of which really offers the necessary level of print job tracking and auditing to tackle waste.

PrinterLogic solves all of these issues by providing organizations with cutting-edge print job management software that offers unparalleled ease of use alongside comprehensive print job tracking features. When combined with its powerful Print Auditing module, our print management solution enables organizations of any size and any sector to analyze printer usage and other important data points across the enterprise, right down to single jobs from particular users or workstations.

For example, PrinterLogic’s Print Auditing feature will help you reveal how networked as well as USB printers are utilized throughout the organization. You can examine individual and aggregate print jobs and easily arrange them for better analysis according to date, time, printer, user, department and fine-grained printing options like grayscale or duplexing. You can even automatically email that data to managers and department heads in the form of a report at scheduled intervals. With that information in hand, the users or departments responsible for the heaviest usage can be identified and incentivized to curb their printing costs.

By making use of PrinterLogic’s automatic, intuitive and comprehensive print job tracking, many of our customers have done just that. In one survey the independent research firm TechValidate found that over two-thirds of verified PrinterLogic customers used our print job management software to reduce print consumables by 15% or more. That’s clearly helped many of them recoup a good chunk of that wasted 17%.

While its auditing feature is great for print job tracking of completed jobs, PrinterLogic also makes proactively managing print jobs far easier. Through its centralized management console, IT staff can effortlessly deploy and administer printers across the entire organization from a single pane of glass. This means that admins can restrict certain users to a specific printer or limit their options (e.g., grayscale, paper type) simply by ticking a checkbox.

As any organization can attest, wasted print jobs are an ongoing—and expensive—issue that can only be addressed with the right tools. With PrinterLogic’s enterprise-class print job management software for managing print jobs and its Print Auditing feature for print job tracking, you can reduce and even eliminate that waste while gaining valuable print management features.