Oft-cited studies have indicated that the costs of corporate printing amount to roughly 3% of an organization’s annual revenue. Many organizations have adopted that figure as a kind of yardstick to determine whether or not their own print budget is getting out of hand. As long as their print spending is pretty much in line with that, they tend to stick with their existing corporate print solutions and the status quo.

At PrinterLogic, by nature we tend to think outside the box. Which is why we’ve challenged this way of approaching corporate print management. Just because organizations generally spend 3% of their annual revenue on printing doesn’t mean your organization has to spend that much. There are effective ways to clamp down on runaway corporate print costs that you might not be putting into practice — or even be aware of.

Here’s what you might call a “printing efficiency checklist” that applies to most corporate print solutions and print environments:

Are you proactively curbing waste? A major printer manufacturer found that, on average, 17% of all print output was considered waste — things like long email signatures that spill over to another printed page, website printouts that stamp the URL at the bottom of an otherwise blank page, or print jobs forgotten at the printer. Most corporate print management practices make no provision for changing user habits to reduce this high level of waste.

Are your users printing only what they need? In the vast majority of print environments, color printing should be considered a luxury, not the default. But corporate print solutions make it too difficult to restrict users to specific modes or printers, especially in large environments, so a vast number of documents that would be perfectly adequate in grayscale are printed in expensive color. The same goes for other printing options like paper type.

Have you right-sized your print infrastructure? Every employee would love to have a dedicated personal printer on his or her desk. The routine answer to overwhelmed print servers is simply adding another print server. Yet all of this extra hardware bloats the infrastructure and drives up costs of procurement, operation and maintenance.

Are you auditing printing according to best practices? Best practices would call for you to have a solid fix on paper, printer and ink/toner usage at all levels — from organization-wide down to the individual user. To be fair, this is often easier said than done. Traditional print infrastructures such as print servers and conventional corporate print management methods don’t allow you to easily collect and analyze comprehensive data about your print environment. Therefore it can be challenging to implement.

PrinterLogic is unlike other corporate print solutions in that cost-effectiveness is in its DNA. It’s able to address every single point on the above checklist and start slashing your print spending from the moment of implementation. For example, its acclaimed centralized admin console brings a new level of ease to corporate print management. And its inherently small footprint allows you to eliminate print servers altogether and shrink your print infrastructure while providing for enhanced reliability and functionality.

Plus PrinterLogic’s Pull Printing module and Print Auditing features modules make it easy to introduce further efficiency into your corporate print management. Pull Printing cuts waste and increases security by making printing into a simple and deliberate two-step process: initiation of the print job followed by its execution (or release). Print Auditing gives you both oversight and insight by collecting and making sense of macro- and micro-level data on your print environment, allowing you to systematically target high usage.

So don’t be content with 3%. PrinterLogic can help you identify cost savings that standard corporate print solutions can’t.

A 2006 study by a leading printer manufacturer found that 17% of all printed output in the enterprise was considered waste.

Before we continue, take a moment for that figure to sink in. Think of all the wasted paper that 17% accounts for in your own organization. All the wasted ink and toner. All the wear and tear on the printers themselves. Environmental consequences notwithstanding, think of how that 17% directly affects your bottom line. It shouldn’t take long to see that there are considerable cost savings bound up in those wasted print jobs. And those savings are just waiting to be unlocked through the right print job management software with the right print job tracking features.

In traditional print environments, properly managing print jobs and maintaining both macro- and micro-level oversight has been one of the most challenging tasks for IT admins. Direct IP printing is renowned for being reliable and stable, but its print job tracking leaves a lot to be desired, and even the most advanced print job management software is unable to deliver a clear window onto the entire print environment. By contrast, print servers make managing print jobs and print job tracking a little easier, but they come with their own brand of headache and create more infrastructure to wrestle with.

For organizations, printing thus becomes a choice between the unmanageability of direct IP and the hassle of print servers—neither of which really offers the necessary level of print job tracking and auditing to tackle waste.

PrinterLogic solves all of these issues by providing organizations with cutting-edge print job management software that offers unparalleled ease of use alongside comprehensive print job tracking features. When combined with its powerful Print Auditing module, our print management solution enables organizations of any size and any sector to analyze printer usage and other important data points across the enterprise, right down to single jobs from particular users or workstations.

For example, PrinterLogic’s Print Auditing feature will help you reveal how networked as well as USB printers are utilized throughout the organization. You can examine individual and aggregate print jobs and easily arrange them for better analysis according to date, time, printer, user, department and fine-grained printing options like grayscale or duplexing. You can even automatically email that data to managers and department heads in the form of a report at scheduled intervals. With that information in hand, the users or departments responsible for the heaviest usage can be identified and incentivized to curb their printing costs.

By making use of PrinterLogic’s automatic, intuitive and comprehensive print job tracking, many of our customers have done just that. In one survey the independent research firm TechValidate found that over two-thirds of verified PrinterLogic customers used our print job management software to reduce print consumables by 15% or more. That’s clearly helped many of them recoup a good chunk of that wasted 17%.

While its auditing feature is great for print job tracking of completed jobs, PrinterLogic also makes proactively managing print jobs far easier. Through its centralized management console, IT staff can effortlessly deploy and administer printers across the entire organization from a single pane of glass. This means that admins can restrict certain users to a specific printer or limit their options (e.g., grayscale, paper type) simply by ticking a checkbox.

As any organization can attest, wasted print jobs are an ongoing—and expensive—issue that can only be addressed with the right tools. With PrinterLogic’s enterprise-class print job management software for managing print jobs and its Print Auditing feature for print job tracking, you can reduce and even eliminate that waste while gaining valuable print management features.

Remember that old prank telephone call: “Is your refrigerator running? Then you better go catch it!” Well, here’s one for the modern enterprise: “Is your print server down? Then you better go cheer it up!”

All joking aside, having a print server down is certainly no laughing matter. Just ask any end user who’s got an urgent report to print or the service desk staff member who’s fielding that user’s frustrated support call. And, sadly, for many organizations, print servers crashing is an all too common occurrence. That downtime hurts morale, hurts productivity and hurts your bottom line.

With that in mind, it makes sense to minimize your organization’s print server downtime to the fullest possible extent. The standard way to do that is through redundancy, which mitigates the effects of your print server crashing and can help reduce downtime. It’s essentially just having a backup at the ready, so when the primary print server is down its “understudy” can immediately get called into action without skipping a beat.

However, looking at the big picture, these backup print servers can actually negate cost savings. Sure, they avoid lost productivity when there are problems with the primary print server crashing, but that redundancy comes at a price. The server hardware has to be procured, powered, maintained, upgraded and replaced. The server software has to be licensed, administered and kept up to date. All that costs money over the short and long term. Furthermore, there’s no guarantee that failover will take place seamlessly when the primary print server goes down. This is why some print management best practices call for double redundancy—a backup to the backup. But that in turn drives up costs of operation, maintenance and procurement even more.

Distribution is another method to reduce downtime. This involves placing a print server (plus multiple backups) within each predefined client pool, be it a print server on every floor, in every department, at every geographic site, or per every 50 or 100 workstations. Fragmenting the print environment in this way means that, unlike consolidated environments, one print server crashing doesn’t restrict printing for the entire organization. The catch is that a fragmented print environment is much harder to manage. When a print server goes down in a distributed environment, it’s more difficult for remote admins to identify it and bring it back online. The opposite redundancy strategy is centralization or consolidation, but that of course simply reverses the benefits and drawbacks when a print server goes down.

For a truly robust and cost-effective solution to prolonged or sporadic print server downtime, there’s PrinterLogic. Our enterprise print management solution provides the benefits of traditional redundancy strategies without having to compromise on key aspects. By leveraging proven direct IP printing technology, PrinterLogic enables your end users to continue to printing like normal in the unlikely event of a server outage. This is the exact opposite of the situation when a print server is down.

However, unlike conventional direct IP print environments, PrinterLogic also features unparalleled centralized administration. Even in highly distributed organizations, PrinterLogic provides a powerful window onto the entire print environment—including clients, drivers and printers—from a single pane of glass anywhere in the organization.

That explains how 73% of PrinterLogic customers reported reducing their printer downtime by at least 15% in a survey conducted by the independent research firm TechValidate. Not only were these organizations able to reduce the downtime that had previously been associated with their print server crashing, many of them also used PrinterLogic to reduce their remote print infrastructure.

Minimal downtime and minimal footprint. Only through PrinterLogic.