Don't let printing and print costs get out of hand
Organisations of all sizes and in all sectors share a number of fundamental challenges, including keeping costs in check, protecting corporate information, and ensuring everyone can work efficiently and productively.
Print is one area where it's easy to let things get out of control, if you don't know who's printing what, which users or teams are printing and copying the most, or how much it all costs. Documents may go uncollected — wasting money and resources, and potentially putting sensitive information at risk. And if a printer develops a fault, how easily can users switch to an alternative device?
You can solve these challenges and more using print management solutions to manage and protect your entire scan and print infrastructure. You'll be able to:
- Gain an overview of your organisation's print, copy and scan activities
- Monitor who's printing what and when
- Keep costs in check by implementing print rules and policies
- Protect information and reduce waste through user authentication
- Optimise workflow productivity and print queue management
Take control, gain insights, increase flexibility
You'll want to choose a print management solution that offers the features and functionalities that align with your organisation's needs. Among the features you'll want to consider are:
User authentication. With centralised control over identities, you ensure that users have to authenticate themselves at a device to release a print job. As well as protecting sensitive information from prying eyes and reducing wasted print, this allows users to send a print job to any networked printer. Some print management solutions also make it easy to manage secure printing from mobile devices, including BYOD.
Monitoring and reporting. Allows you to track and monitor usage in real time through regular, scheduled and on-demand reporting. You have the data you need to identify and investigate excessive or other anomalous usage by an individual or department. You can also create executive reports that provide top-level management summaries and sustainability information.
User and cost management. You can manage and charge back costs by assigning users to cost centres, or enabling them to select the relevant cost centre, billing or project code before printing a document. You can also assign price lists to different devices, cost centres and users.
And by creating print rules or policies, you can ensure tighter cost management by allowing different user roles to access different devices and features. For example, you can make duplex printing the default for everyone; or limit colour printing to certain roles.
Centralised user and cost management can help you reduce your spend on print services by as much as 30%*
(* Cost Reduction, YSoft, https://www.ysoft.com/en/solutions/business-challenges/reduce-costs)
Cost accounting and budget management. To provide cost control and flexibility, choose a print management solution that allows you to assign print budgets to users, with the option to top up their accounts. In an environment such as a university, for example, this allows you to give students a free print quota that they can add to as required.
Print queue management. If you run an in-house print room, you may want to choose a print management solution that offers efficient management of your production print queue in addition to your office print queue.
Workflow management. If you're on a digital transformation journey, you may want to be sure the solution you choose can also help you develop efficient scanning workflows to further optimise everyone's productivity.
Print management software solutions help you optimise the use of the multifunctional printers (MFPs) and other printers in your organisation. A solution like
Dispatcher Paragon gives you centralised control over your users and devices; allows you to set print rules and policies; and provides options for print queue management and user authentication that help to protect information, and cut costs and waste.
Organisations without print management solutions often have no idea how much they're printing, how much they're spending on print, or even how many devices they have. Once they install a print management solution, such as
Dispatcher Paragon, they can monitor what's being printed, gain insight into what they're spending on print, and look at ways to reduce cost, waste, and information and device security risks. At the same time, a print management solution can help an organisation increase flexibility — by allowing users to print at any MFP or printer, for example, or by enabling them to send print jobs from their mobiles.
Print Management solutions also enable you to charge back the cost of printing, copying and scanning to relevant teams, departments, users and projects. Our
Dispatcher Paragon solution won the
Buyers Lab (BLI) 2021 Pick Award for Outstanding Cost Accounting & Recovery Solution, with one of the judges commenting: "Konica Minolta
Dispatcher Paragon comes with everything you need to take control of your print environment."
A print management solution like
Dispatcher Paragon or
YSoft SafeQ can help you save money by enabling you to monitor and manage printing, copying and scanning usage. It enables you to implement policies that reduce print costs (such as duplex and black and white by default); gives you the data you need to tackle unusual or excessive printing behaviours; and helps you reduce wasted print by requiring users to authenticate before releasing their print jobs.
A print management solution helps you improve security of your corporate information and your MFPs and other printers. Requiring user authentication does away with the risk of uncollected print jobs falling into the wrong hands. You can restrict access to specific printers by allowing only certain roles to select them. Using print management software like
BENS Server also helps to protect your network from external threats, and allows you to implement secure cloud and mobile printing.
Your benefits at a glance
Transparent cost control.
Effectively manage users, devices, print features, budgets and quotas.
Secure print environment.
Reduce the risk of unauthorised access to devices and sensitive corporate information.
Real-time monitoring.
Identify printing hotspots so that you can take action to change print behaviours.
Flexible reporting.
Generate easy-to-understand reports for management overview; export report data into other formats for sharing and further analysis.
