Posted by Devin Anderson
We’re living in the age of Big Data. While that data helps us make more informed decisions and deliver targeted solutions to longstanding problems, it’s not without its problems.
To begin with, there’s the matter of its acquisition: How do you gather the most comprehensive, useful data in the first place—and in a manner that doesn’t inconvenience the individual user? And then there’s making sense of all that information: Once the data is collected, how can you organize and present in a way that has value?
Print tracking is one method of collecting essential information about your organization. Tracking printer usage can help you determine if consumables (e.g., paper, toner) are being squandered in various branches or departments, which printers are approaching the end of their lifespan, or identify the end users that are placing the heaviest demands on their local printers. By extension, print tracking can help you allocate resources accordingly and even shave significant costs off your IT budget.
Without the right printer tracking software, however, any attempt to track printer usage might not be very fruitful. Why? Because a lot of what claims to be printer tracking software falls short on one or both of the counts mentioned above: Either it doesn’t offer enterprise-wide, unobtrusive data collection or it fails to process and present that data in a comprehensible way. Partial or unclear print tracking data is just as bad as no data at all.
Bearing those two typical shortcomings in mind, PrinterLogic’s printer tracking software was designed to be comprehensive and above all useful, providing you with strong, reliable, coherent data on which to base the kinds of cost- and resource-saving decisions that can have a profound effect on your print environment as well as your organization as a whole.
PrinterLogic’s printer tracking software is available in the form of its Print Job Auditing module. This module integrates seamlessly with your existing print environment to give intuitive macro- and micro-level views onto printing activity and costs. Some of its data points to track printer usage of both network and USB printers include:
- Date and time print jobs were executed
- Name, job title, manager, department and computer of initiating user
- Print job details such as color or grayscale printing, duplexing and document name
PrinterLogic’s printer tracking software generates intuitive reports from these print tracking data points. You can even have these reports automatically emailed to department or branch managers on a regular basis to encourage efficiency initiatives.
And with access to these print tracking data points, you can also link the costs of printing in your organization to real-world usage. By arranging the resulting statistics according to timeframe, department, user or printer, you’ll be able to identify:
- Your organization’s top 10, 100 or 500 printer users
- The names of documents printed on a particular printer at a specified time
- The terminals or users that frequently initiate large or color print jobs
- How many pages any given printer is outputting over weekly, monthly or quarterly periods
By using PrinterLogic’s Print Auditing module to track printer usage across your organization and create understandable reports, printing activity and costs like these are no longer mysteries—they’re facts you can act on.