Executive Debrief
Best Practices in Enterprise Printing
1. Develop a print strategy:
The corporate print strategy is critical to managing the print environment and its costs. The absence of a consistently implemented print management strategy
can be a burden to Corporations in many ways. A large majority of
installed printers are often low or slow throughput models, so despite the sheer numbers of devices it
can be challenging to meet the needs of large print
jobs. Inexpensive desktop printers often have the most expensive printing costs. Even obtaining an inventory of a
Company's printer fleet can be daunting without
the proper tools. A print strategy would provide a map of printer deployment ultimately
reducing costs.
2. Pro-active management:
Printers should be managed throughout the entire printer
lifecycle from deployment, maintenance to retirement
& replacement. For effective manage, you should have data of the asset lifecycle – maintenance history, problem or alert history, and usage. With this information, you
can schedule printer retirement. Lease & purchase
financials need to be factored into the printer
lifecycle decision process. A maintenance &
problem notification facility is an essential part
of pro-active management.
3. Track & Measure:
All best practices include measuring. assessing and
improving. You need a unobtrusive tool that
continuously measures what, where & how much you are
printing. With that data you can continue to optimize your print environment.
Your Best Practice tool: printerRx
Learn More
PrinterRx training highlight
Setting
up SNMP printer traps
Grant's Tech Tip
Setting up SNMP traps
SNMP printer traps are alerts sent from tcp/ip based printers to management software to provide alerts
when a fault or other important condition has occurred.
This provides immediate feedback to PrinterRx when a printer fault occurs.
There are two
possible methods for setting the SNMP traps: (1)
enter the printerRx ip address on the front panel of
the printer Or (2) enter the printerRx ip address in
printer's internal website.
For more information
select on-line training in the
printerRx Support portal.
Want to
estimate your printer's power costs?
Calculate Your annual power costs and compare with Energy Saving printers.
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power cost calculator
for:
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Watching your Vendors
Last
month's newsletter looked
at the source of the biggest hidden costs. These hidden costs are shown on
average to be between 60% to 75% of cost per page. Many proactive
corporations have begun to address out-of-control printing costs by
outsourcing the problem. After outsourcing, how do you know that printing costs are
now under control? Best practices always include measurement, and
that means tracking your vendors.
So how can you manage your
vendors? We will talk about 3 areas where vendor management is
critical.
-
Billing
-
Are your monthly invoices correct? Billing requires accurate, automatically captured, & timely data. A common scenario is obtaining page counts manually or contacting the
customer to provide the correct information!
Your printer fleet management software should capture
accurate printing data which automatically
populates the billing system. Contracts are often billed on a per page basis. To understand the true value to you,
your invoices and the actual expenses incurred by you
needs to be compared. These actual expenses should also be captured for this comparison.
-
Service Level Agreements (SLA) -
Service Level Agreements specify contractual activities that ensure your printers are available for use.
Your contract may state that the devices will be
up 95% of the time. How do you
measure that to ensure that your vendor is
adhering to the terms? Is your vendor
also managing availability time? Probably not!
What about technician response time for failures
& repairs? The only way to ensure that the vendor adheres to the SLA is to
continuously monitor the critical items. These include % uptimes on a per printer & average basis and average time it takes to resolve any printer problems.
-
Total
Cost of Printing
- Total printing costs include much more than
consumables. What portion of overhead
costs is your vendor assuming, if any? Is your
vendor taking a pro-active role in replacing
older, operationally expensive printers and
optimizing your printer fleet to obtain a better
average cost per page?
Your vendors are not driven by your interests. Any prudent company
actively manages its vendors to negotiate optimal contracts.
PrinterRx Dashboard provides a snapshot view of your enterprise
printers for :
Vendor management
- Are vendors
complying with SLA uptime requirements?
Best Practices
- What is your
printing trend?
- Where are your
under-utilized & high cost printers?
Unveiling
Power Costs for Printers
An unused printer consumes power. In the 90's, Energy Star office
equipment program established specifications for computers, monitors,
printers and other office equipment which focused mainly on power-saving
"sleep" mode during periods of non-use.
An energy efficient printer automatically enters a power-saver "sleep"
mode after a period of inactivity. With power-saver mode on,
a laser printer's energy consumption averages 1/3 of a printer
with power-saver turned off; With power-saver mode on, an Inkjet's
energy consumption averages 42% of a printer with power-saver turned
off. (ref:
Rocky Mountain Institute). A laser printer consumes more power
than an inkjet.
Spending a large portion of time in low-power
mode not only saves energy but helps printing
equipment run cooler and last longer. With energy
efficient printers, businesses can also realize savings on air
conditioning and maintenance.
Over its lifetime, an energy
efficient office can save enough
electricity to light an entire home for more than 4
years. Saving energy prevents pollution.
Printers are generally turned on 24 hours a day, so
power management features are important for saving
energy and are an easy way to reduce air pollution.
Learn More about Energy Star
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