Implementing a Print Management Solution

There's a lot that maligns the great work that goes into your typical office laser printer or copy machine:

• "50% of my support calls are print- or printer-related."
• "I see printouts laying everywhere because they're not being picked up fast enough."
• "Office printing consumes 3% or more of an organization's revenue."
• "It takes 60% of a tree to make one 2,000-sheet case of letter-sized paper."
• "There's always a line at the copy machine; it's so hard to use and it jams all the time."
• "We're not even using half of what it can do."
• "That new color printer isn't used often during the day, so why are we being charged for all these prints?"

In a world full of smartphones and an Internet full of information, it seems...well, silly to print in the first place; but to the Gen Z and Millennial generations, printed pages are all about accessibility, productivity, and sanity--looking at print as a way to unplug from the digital super highway. So if printing is likely here to stay, having a print management strategy is as necessary as your expense reimbursement policy.

Defining Print Management

Print Management is the process of measuring, monitoring, and optimizing printer use in any organization. It focuses on devices and supplies, as well as printing behaviors. What aspects of devices, supplies, and printing behaviors are managed is up to each organization's goals; it's not one size fits all.

Starting the Journey

First, understand what aspect(s) of printer ownership you want to manage. There are several key aspects, and more than one may apply. Let's start by introducing each one and then covering them in more detail!

• Cost Containment. According to some sources, a single employee can cost over $750 annually in print. Even in a 100-person company, that's a good chunk of change.
• Security. "Tray trash"--those piles of printouts that look abandoned? They may contain Personal Identifying Information (PII) of employees or customers or valuable Intellectual Property (IP).
• Availability. If one printer is down, the jobs can be routed to a backup somewhere else, or held until the print job's owners ask for them to be released at another printer.
• Environmental Impact. Let's face it: paper, toner, and ink are not the most Earth-friendly things to be used indiscriminately. Trees and water are removed and trash takes its place.
• Utilization. Copiers, particularly, do far more than pump out paper. The scanners and scanning software that come with many newer copiers can be used to accelerate the adoption of digital filing solutions.
• Abuse. Most printing that happens outside of the typical workday is not work-related. School reports, flyers for garage sales and lost puppies, a personal publishing business as a side-hustle...these are all pages you pay for in wear-and-tear, paper, toner, electricity, and space.

Cost Containment

My experience with customer-provided data is that the typical print job is around 5 pages long and a regular employee prints 15 times a day, or 75 pages a day. With 20 days in a normal month, that's 1,500 pages each month, resulting in 18,000 pages annually at a blended rate of . Per employee.

You're probably not going to start charging employees to print things, so the next best thing is to shrink the sheets of paper, toner, and ink you use. In my 25 years in print management, it's a hard fact that if your people know that something out there is monitoring their print activity, it'll drop about 12% without doing anything else. That 12% is abuse and waste.

In the move to cut printing costs, two big players eat your money: single-sided and color printing. By switching to a two-sided printing setting you immediately save just a bit under 50% in paper cost because a 100-page report now prints on 50 sheets instead of 100. Some use cases will still require single-sided printing, but the bulk of what's printed in a day...being two-sided doesn't matter. Color versus black-and-white printing is another big save. Common managed print contracts today (NOTE: "managed print" is not the same as "print management" because the cost factor is adjusted at the printer in managed print, while print management largely addresses employees' attitudes and behaviors towards printing) charge between $0.007 and $0.015 per black-and-white page printed, but climb to $0.08 to $0.10 per page when printing in color. As a workflow discussion, you don't have to print the PowerPoint slide deck in color just to edit copy offline, but you should print it in color when giving a printed version to the customer during the meeting.

Going further, cost containment can include other proactive actions like creating "paper budgets" for groups or individuals which doesn't stop them from printing if they run out, but they get a nag screen or some other notification every time they print after they run out. Print policies can help, too. Within the print management solution, you define a policy like "Don't print from Microsoft Outlook" and then apply that policy to groups of people. You can even route print jobs to more capable (and less costly) printers based on criteria like page count.

Security

In my earlier (and naive) days, a company I worked for would generate a report each Friday that listed billable hours for on-project employees, and this report included a field for the employee's Social Security number. It sat in an unmonitored space in the building for the entire week, until it was replaced with a fresh copy. Federal and state fines when breaching an individual's privacy rights can range from $100 per violation to over $1,000,000 per violation, with many agencies calling the next day a new violation. Exposed PII can bankrupt organizations and potentially lead to jail for those who break the law.

Or perhaps a researcher is being fired and decides to print reams of privileged IP, trade secrets, or sensitive information on his way out the door. In another scenario, a vendor sees an important note on an administrative assistant's desk and makes a quick copy. That important note ends up being shared on social media and the threat of insider trading looms.

If you're not creating an auditable trail for employee print activity or creating an authentication event at the copier, you're opening yourself up not for a security leak, but a security waterfall, and this is especially true for copiers and printers that can access the Internet.

Availability

When a copier or a printer is down, you know about it. From cute "sick computer" imagery in a Teams message to the fury in an e-mail, your users will let you know when their workflow completely stops. With the "swipe and print" solutions available from most print management solutions, all an employee needs to do is authenticate at another printer and let their job print. No back to the desk, no reprinting. Just a short walk to the other printer and they're back in business.

Environmental Impact

Print Management solutions can be used to assist in larger Environment Impact projects within a company. According to the Paper Calculator, every sheet of paper consumes:

• 0.08 pounds of wood pulp
• 300 BTUs of energy
• 0.18 pounds of carbon dioxide (CO2)
• 0.214 gallons of water
• 0.192 pounds of waste

Print Management contributes to the reduction in environmental impact by removing unnecessary print, encouraging double-sided print, and providing the data that contributes to the larger data store being used to track environmental impact reduction.

Utilization

Printers are designed to print a certain number of pages per month. That volume is considered its "service volume" and is used to help calculate the utilization of a printer, or how much value it is providing just by being there. In most cases, organizations have too much service volume for its actual need. Right-sizing or optimizing printer fleets is a common objective in print management, focusing on retaining printers that provide error-free operation at the lowest cost per page.

Abuse

The abuse of company resources is a potential security risk, largely because it happens after hours, exposing other property to risk through unlocked doors. Printing personal things at work can be costly, too. The cost of color prints is upwards of 8 times that of a monochrome print, and higher-quality paper will cost more per ream than standard paper. In one example of printer abuse, an employee was printing multiple copies of a publication freely available electronically and then selling the copies at 100% profit. Print management software captured the abuse and an investigation into utilization (because a monthly bill was higher than expected) discovered the problem.

I Have My Objectives, Now What?

Go hunting. There are a lot of different print management solutions out there and even though many share the same features and functions, how they do it and where can mean the difference between a great and a horrible experience. Armed with what you want to do in your print management initiative, call the companies listed below. Tell them what you want to do and how you wish to achieve it. Do you care if it is cloud-based or something you maintain yourself? Ask questions:

• Do you support my environment? Windows computers, macOS, Linux? What about iPhones or Android phones? Is everybody in the office, only a few people, or nobody? Are there any kinds of printers I should avoid? Hint: There should be full support for all desktop and mobile clients. Also, print management isn't really useful on things like dot matrix or thermal printers (like the kind used for badges, mailing labels, etc.).
• Is there client software I need to use? If so, how is it updated? How is it deployed? Hint: Client software will need to be involved and deployed. Some solutions have their own deployment solutions, but all will support software deployment solutions either as an MSI or EXE installer. Some offer automated updates with a way to test first so that things don't break.
• How do you get data from my printers? SNMP? Where is the agent installed? How is it configured? Is it automated or do I need to update it? Hint: Everybody has a data collection tool for printers to get things like meter reads, toner levels, and service status. Most are "install once and let it run" and are configured centrally. These utilities are updated regularly to accommodate new printers and manufacturers, as well as to improve data collection.
• How quickly can I start seeing value? This is a "how long to onboard me?" question. Hint: You want to start collecting useful data within 30 days.
• What kind of reporting is available? Are there already dashboards and preconfigured reports available for immediate use, or is data extracted and then analyzed in third-party tools like Microsoft's PowerBi, SAP Tableau, or even in Access or Excel? Hint: Print management software comes with both preconfigured reports and the ability to access the data (via an extract) to suit your needs.

If you plan on running software in your servers, find out what they need to get the job done, and plan on having to dedicate a server (or 2, 3, or 4 or more) and a fast SQL Server, too. If you want to go cloud, grill them on their supporting architecture:

1. Is it fault tolerant?
2. What can't I do if it goes south?
3. How long are outages during planned updates?
4. How often do those outages occur?
5. Do I have access to a health dashboard?
6. How do you communicate problems?
7. What are the SLAs?

It's ok to have a lot of questions about impact, timing, support, data sovereignty, and other operational topics. These questions should be answered fully and in a place of respect and care.

The likelihood is that more than one print management solution will fit your needs, so it comes down to....

Kicking the Tires

As part of the sales process, you'll probably get to see the software in action through some demos, whether they're prerecorded or live. But there's nothing quite as fun as getting to try it out for yourself, so ask. "I really think your solution will work for me, and I'd like to try it out for a little while to see it all working." Look for a 45-day test license, since the timer starts ticking almost immediately on most trials. This way, you have a couple of days to get things deployed and configured without biting into the trial period. It will be a limited license: it will be good for a handful of printers, about 10 or so clients, and should come with the additional features (secure printing, scanning, job routing and rules) you hope to implement.

You should receive some guidance from the provider at first, but you really want to do things on your own. How easy is it to deploy? Does it affect how slow/fast my clients operate? What's the onboarding like for the end user? What functionality am I still missing, or can't I use very well? Check out those reports. Can you break things and put them back together? How good is the documentation? Is there online help, and how fast could you find an answer? Call technical support, even if it is just to say "Hi!" As you go, make a list of questions that you need answers to, so that you can address them either during the trial period or after.

Validate the data being captured. If the total meter for a printer is reporting 1,000,000 in the software, what is the printer's meter saying? If you print 30 monochrome pages and 1 color page, is that what's showing up in the report? The same goes for paper sizes and if you print single- or double-sided. Outside of some workflow improvements, the data available so you can make decisions is the one product they are delivering, so it needs to be accurate.

Ask them: "If I buy your solution at the end of the trial period, do I have to move to another instance of the application, or can I stay on the one I've been using?" Hopefully you don't have to lose the information you captured during the trial, or redeploy anything again.

The Road Ahead

With the proper planning, research, and partner your road towards print management will be a great one! The major players (PaperCut, Pharos, SafeQ, Tungsten Automation, Vasion) are highly respected and provide an excellent customer experience. Pretty soon you'll be optimizing, directing, and printing only what's necessary to your heart's content!

More Info?

I am always available to help you, no matter where you are on your journey! Your initial consultation is free and project pricing is designed to provide you a high value experience. I utilize Calendly for appointment setting and Google Meet for all conversations (video is optional). Let's talk!

https://calendly.com/solswold