CUTTING BACK ON PRINT WASTE

 Cutting back on print waste - March 2010 (PDF) 

Everyone is guilty of printing off pages that they don’t actually want – pages known in the trade as “orphans”. Bill Papas of Upstream Print Solutions explains why you make orphans and how to find them a good home.   

Have you ever sent a document to the printer and never gone to collect it? Have you ever walked past the printer at work and seen a pile of paper unclaimed by anyone in the office? The answer for the vast majority of Australian workers is a resounding yes.  

In fact, we estimate that two out of every five pages printed each year ends up without an owner to claim it. These abandoned documents become what we term ‘orphans’. At best they get recycled. More often than not they go in the bin, at a considerable cost to both your business and the environment.  

According to analyst firm IDC, printing costs account for up to three per cent of a company’s expenditure and the average company prints 1100 pages per employee per year, costing between $AU500 and $AU1500 per user. That means a business with 20 staff will spend an average of $10,000 to $30,000 a year on printing. If 40 per cent of these pages go in the bin, the costs can be significant.  

What the above figures highlight is that a large proportion of printing is completely unnecessary and very costly. The good news for small and medium businesses is that while the ‘paperless’ office may be an unachievable ideal, printing less is not that hard a nut to crack. Reducing your print output and your print orphans is a powerful way to reduce costs. It’s also a far better environmental outcome than recycling.  

Print audit

The challenge for many companies is the lack of ability to understand how much they are printing and who is printing what. This is where “managed print services” companies can help. For many businesses the tendency is to just buy a printer and never think about it again. By doing this, the business has no visibility into how that printer is being used, what it is being used for and whether or not there is a more efficient way to print.  

A “print audit” will help a business understand its workflow and business practices. The audit process includes a physical audit that will identify the ‘orphan trays’ in the workplace, then examine the types of documents being printed, how those documents flow through the business and whether there are any problems or inefficiencies in that process.  

After an audit, printer numbers will often be reduced, suppliers streamlined and printing minimised. Our experience suggests that printing costs can also be slashed by a quarter as a result.  

If an audit is not something your business can undertake immediately, there are other, simpler, actions to cut your printing costs.  

These steps include:
• “Hold and walk up printing” means that documents are only printed and released when the user is standing at the printer and physically releases the job.

• “Swipe and release” technology uses the swipe cards some businesses already use as security devices to release a print job only once a user is standing at the printer. The additional benefits of augmenting the swipe cards, to work with the reader on a machine, is that they can be used at multiple work sites and they provide authentication for secure printing.

• Printer mailboxes allow you to create personal output trays that can be set up for different users (up to 12 per machine) so that staff are aware of which job is theirs. Printing can then take place without the concern of different users’ documents being mixed up. Printer mailboxes mean a much lower likelihood of print outs automatically being deposited into the orphans tray and a higher chance that users will return other jobs to the owner identified on the tray.

• Smart scanning. Count the number of filing cabinets in the office. If there is more than one, you’ve probably been printing too much. Ask what the primary purpose of having the paper is. Is it to be stored or moved around the organisation? If so, it can be scanned and an electronic copy sent to file. Keeping these copies electronically means staff will be less likely to print unnecessary documents (which then get left on the printer) but rather will know to save the soft copy to file.

• Communicate. The final step that organisations can take is to simply communicate with staff about printing and the impact it has on the business and the environment. By creating a culture where printing less is a priority, staff are much more likely to think twice before printing a document.  

All of the above technologies encourage staff to make a conscious decision about what they are printing and what it will be used for.