Optimising Your Printing Environment
What is Printing Environment Optimisation?
Optimising your printing environment refers to focusing on improving the efficiency and effectiveness of an organisation’s print environment. The aim is to minimise waste, reduce costs and maximise return on investment from printing resources.
How to Optimise an Organisation’s Printing Environment?
There are a number of ways through which an organisation can optimise its printing environment. Below are steps which can be taken and suggestions to optimise an organisation’s print environment:
Assess the Current Print Infrastructure
Understanding the current state of your organisation’s printing environment is the first step in understanding how you can optimise it. This includes the number and types of printers, their locations, how and how much they are used and associated costs.
Invest in Print Management Software
Implementing software for the organisation to monitor and control printing activities across departments allows for usage tracking, enforcing printing policies and allocating costs accordingly. Print Management Software is also capable of generating printing reports.
Continuously monitoring printing usage helps to identify printing trends, inefficiencies and areas of improvement. This in turn can lead to refining printing policies and optimising printer placement.
Enhance Printing Security
Organisations can protect data by implementing a secure print infrastructure. Security and compliance in the print environment are essential to guarantee sensitive information remains confidential.
Requiring user authentication before printing ensures that confidential documents are only accessed by the intended recipient, as users must be physically present at the printer. This approach also eliminates unclaimed printouts that could contain sensitive information.
Authentication methods can include access cards, PIN codes or a combination of both, offering flexible and robust solutions to enhance security.
Optimising Printer Settings
Implementing printing policies to enforce duplex printing and default black-and-white settings can significantly reduce paper waste and ink consumption. By requiring staff to print in colour only when necessary, resource usage is optimised and operational costs are lowered. In addition, a reduction in paper waste supports sustainability initiatives, helping the organisation align with environmental goals while promoting cost efficiency.
Cater For Everyone
uniFLOW Online, Canon’s Print Management Solution, offers guest printing where the user would not have an account set up with the organisation but would still be able to print from a copier using a guest code rather than an access card. Having default settings in place would be beneficial to ensure no added costs.
Investing in Multifunctional Devices
Consolidating printing in larger multifunctional devices is more cost-effective than having multiple devices as it simplifies maintenance, maximises cost efficiency, saves space and overall contributes to improved workflow efficiency.
Canon’s range of multifunctional printers incorporates cutting-edge technologies to meet the business demands of any office environment. In addition, businesses can choose from a range of all-in-one colour printers or all-in-one black and white printers, depending on business needs.
Educate employees
Providing training and instruction documents for employees can prove beneficial for an organisation in making staff aware of the costs and environmental impact of printing. Try to encourage responsible printing practices such as printing only when necessary and using print preview to avoid unnecessary printouts.
Just-in-time Maintenance and Upgrades
Having your printing fleet covered by a maintenance agreement is beneficial for optimising performance, reducing downtime and ensuring the longevity of devices.
