Does your print environment help your organization reduce costs?

Cutting the costs

Money, money, money. Every company is doing what it can to thrive and survive in the current economy. Reducing costs without compromise is a critical area. Despite this being an almost universal motivation, there’s one frequently overlooked area: printing.
 
Considering printing can incur up to 3% of your annual revenue, quite often it’s never given a second thought. How much does printing cost your organization? According to Buyer’s Lab around 90% of companies don’t know as they don’t track their printing costs. Ouch.
 
Let’s take a look at how a Y Soft print management can save you money.

Centralized management – get organized.

Print management begins with a centralized view of your printing. Whether you are in one building or have locations around the world, a centralized view of how much is being printed, by whom and when will be key to optimizing your printing environment. Reducing the number of print devices, servers, and consumables enables real cost savings.

Reporting – gain insight

You can’t change what you don’t know, and getting visibility into your organization’s overall printing activity is a great way to reduce costs. Reports can provide detailed analysis and reporting of the cost of printing. You can learn who is printing, from what applications, which printers are the high-cost printers, and the average cost per page. The YSoft SAFEQ Reporting module is incredibly helpful in quantifying print cost savings. With C-Level information, granular detailed reports and green savings reports, it is easy to see how and where optimizations can be made within your print environment.

Rule based printing – enforced print governance

Once you know what to change, you can set rules to eliminate wasteful printing to match print governance policies related to cost saving initiatives. Did you know that color printing can cost around 8 times as much as black and white? Unsurprisingly, single-side printing uses up twice as much paper as printing on both sides of paper. By setting rules for printing, such as grayscale and duplex, there are some big savings to be made. Departments such as accounting, that typically do lots of month end printing, can have those print jobs routed to printers that have less costs associated with them.

Authentication – stop unnecessary printing

Print jobs that are forgotten or unnecessarily printed quickly increase costs and waste. By not printing until the user authenticates at the printer, print jobs that are no longer needed are never printed. This can have an overnight impact on printing volume and wasted consumables.

Scan Workflows – go digital

Digitizing time-consuming manual tasks results in fewer emails and improve productivity. Using  scan workflows to scan and automatically route digital documents can help reduce costs with lower spending on consumables, energy, physical storage costs and more time to focus on other things.

Client Based Print Roaming – reduce or eliminate print servers

Pull printing (what Y Soft calls its Print Roaming module) enables users to print on any printer, a productivity enhancer for sure. When using Client Based Print Roaming, which uses our lightweight serverless appliance, you can considerably decrease the number of printer servers. Lower hardware, software and maintenance costs reduces your overall infrastructure costs and frees up funds and time to improve business processes.

Software as a Service – predictable costs

The ‘as a service’ (Saas) model comes with many benefits. Moving from a capital expense to an operating expense is extremely beneficial from a financial perspective as costs are spread over a monthly or quarterly basis instead of one bigger upfront cost. Alongside Y Soft’s per-device model, where you only pay for the printers you use not the number of users, subscription pricing means predictable costs. Your financial colleagues will thank you for helping on cash flow management.  

Conclusion

In short, there are many ways in which your print environment can help you save your organization costs. Having a holistic and comprehensive managed print service comes with many benefits, one of which is of course cost savings. We help many organizations around the globe run smarter and save money on their printing. Budgets are precious, spend your money wisely. Minimize costs and maximize value. Does your print environment help your organization reduce costs or is it costing you more than it should? It’s time to take back control and make your printing work for you.
 
If you are ready to reduce costs at the server level, printer level and day-to-day usage level contact one of our team today.
 
Get in touch.