Once organizations realize how much they’re actually spending on SMB or enterprise printing, they often want to take immediate steps to reduce print costs. The question that naturally arises is, what do those steps look like? If they were doable or obvious, why weren’t they being taken since the beginning?
The truth is that it’s not uncommon for organizations to overlook the excesses in their printing and print management costs because, well, they’re not assumed to be excesses at all. When an employee is regularly printing ordinary documents on a color printer, for example, you might be surprised to find how many companies simply chalk that up to the way things are. It’s the same when companies are devoting hours and hours to routine tasks like monitoring and rebooting print servers or troubleshooting printer installation issues.
Basic tips for reducing printing costs
To effectively reduce printing costs, the first thing to do is reset all your assumptions about what SMB and enterprise printing is and instead focus on what it should be. If employees should be printing almost exclusively in black and white, then their default printer settings should automatically revert to black and white. If departmental printing trends need to be monitored to ensure that printer and consumables usage are being kept in check, then a reliable and useful print auditing system should be in place.
It’s also necessary to consider print management as a vital component of your organization ’s printing. Are your IT and support staff spending more time deploying printers and scrambling to deal with printing issues than they should be? How might the elimination of unnecessary print infrastructure reduce overall printing costs permanently? Are print servers even worth it? (Spoiler: No, they’re not.)
These hard-to-quantify expenditures on print management tend to get overlooked when organizations are trying to implement these tips for reducing printing costs, and that in turn reduces the potential impact of any cost-saving initiative.
Integration, not initiatives: How PrinterLogic SaaS helps to reduce printing costs
PrinterLogic SaaS (formerly PrinterCloud) is a next-generation, cloud-based SaaS print management solution from PrinterLogic. It’s been designed to simplify print management in a holistic and fundamental way, which means that measures to reduce printing costs are integrated right into our solution from the moment it’s deployed. And that integration makes all the difference. Unlike initiatives, which can come and go depending on the resources needed to implement them, company policy or employee buy-in, PrinterLogic SaaS shifts the print management paradigm so cost-saving is a matter of course.
Unlike lesser cloud-based printing solutions, PrinterLogic SaaS deploys seamlessly alongside your existing print infrastructure and has no requirements like special printers with proprietary functionality or extra servers. In fact, PrinterLogic SaaS—like its proven on-premises counterpart—enables you to eliminate print servers completely from your print environment. Not only does that eliminate the ongoing costs of purchasing, maintaining and upgrading those print servers, it also eliminates the frustrating, time-consuming and expensive aspects of having to deal with them and their vulnerabilities.
PrinterLogic SaaS is able to do that through a powerful and unique combination of direct IP printing and centralized management. That means you can deploy and administer printers—right down to their most detailed settings—anywhere in the organization from a single pane of glass. And thanks to direct IP printing, your print environment is no longer susceptible to shared spooler crashes or even WAN outages. That uptime equates to cost savings that aren’t always apparent until you’ve abandoned print servers for good.
Just as importantly, PrinterLogic SaaS features built-in print auditing functionality to help reduce printer costs organization-wide. You can easily pinpoint your heaviest users or have printing trends sent automatically to managers and department heads on a regular basis. PrinterLogic SaaS’s Print Auditing also gives you its own tips for reducing printing costs, such as printer consolidation guidance and real-world cost analysis.
No other print management solution will get your print environment as lean and streamlined as PrinterLogic SaaS, and no other print management solution can promise the oversight and ease of management that PrinterLogic SaaS does. Ready to start saving money? Sign up for the free trial period.